Affirmative

1AC – Cultural Hybridity
1AC – The Black Atlantic
The Middle Passage was unique in its production of relocation, displacement, and
forced transition – these effects catastrophized the Western vision of modernity and
forced the rootless nature of those affected by the black Atlantic
Gikandi 02 Simon, Currently Robert Hayden Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, he is the recipient of awards from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon
Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His most recent books include Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of
Colonialism and Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Available from Project MUSE, American Literary History, 14.3, pg. 609-10,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v014/14.3gikandi.html, ―Race and Cosmopolitanism‖ | ADM
Cosmopolitanism is clearly one of the most prevalent terms in discussions of social identity in the new twenty-first century, the subject of intense
debate among émigré and global intellectuals. It is particularly appealing to scholars who are equally unhappy with the nationalism and patriotism
that has governed the organization of the disciplines and the institutions of knowledge production. In Gilroy's version of
cosmopolitanism, ideals of justice and freedom seem to wane when confronted by what he aptly
calls a catastrophic modernity (284). While the cosmopolitanism of scholars such as Martha Nussbaum in her "Patriotism and
Cosmopolitanism" is rooted in idealized communities of justice and morality, Gilroy is categorical in his claim that rootlessness per se is
the enabling condition of cosmopolitanism. In Against Race, the black Atlantic—represented by
displaced Africans such as Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley—is the exemplar of a quintessentially rootless
cosmopolitanism (117). While other influential advocates of cosmopolitanism work under the conviction that out of a certain alternative
set of affiliations one chooses to be a citizen of the world, Gilroy's focus is on forms of cosmopolitanism [End Page
609] enforced by slavery and exile. This is why Equiano and Wheatley are his illustrative subjects. What makes the examples of
Equiano and Wheatley unique compared to other Africans, let's say Johannes Capitein, ex-slave Predicant of the Dutch Reformed Church, or Anton
Amo, a student of Eric Wolff, a key player in the culture of the Enlightenment in Germany? What makes the cosmopolitanism of ex-slaves shuttling
between strange worlds, struggling to reconcile competing idioms, more appealing than those who freely choose to live in one world or another?
Gilroy provides several interesting claims for the uniqueness of the products of the
Middle Passage: Equiano and Wheatley and their narratives are "the effects of relocation,
displacement, and forced transition between cultural codes and habits, language, and
religion," and their works demand from us "a sophisticated grasp of cultural syncretism, adaptation, and intermixture"; as cultural
hybrids, their engagement with Africa was minimal and neither "returned to the African homelands from which
their long journeys through slavery had begun" (117). In this last point, Equiano and Wheatley stand in stark contrast to Capitein and Amo who,
having made the long journey into the heart of the Enlightenment, gave up Europe and returned (some might say regressed) into the "unmodern"
world of their ancestors. Yet there is no compelling evidence that the experiences of these groups of black subjects were not as diverse as they appear
on first sight—they were both rooted and rootless. There is nothing wrong with Gilroy's identification with the "rootlessness" of Wheatley and
Equiano; what I find problematic in his version of black cosmopolitanism is the sentimentality that constantly creeps into his analysis every time he
tries to endow rootlessness with value. It seems to me that Gilroy is so keen to posit displacement as the precondition for cosmopolitanism that he
forgets the suffering it causes even those who, like Equiano and Wheatley, ultimately come to terms with it. If rootlessness and suffering were enough
integers of cosmopolitanism, then what is to deny many of the African refugees scattered throughout the world a cosmopolitan identity?
As a result, we endorse the exploration of the black Atlantic, a call for a strategic
realignment to shift away from national and ethnic frames of reference. Instead of a
unidirectional narrative “back to Africa” or “forward to North America,” the black
Atlantic furnishes us with the metaphor of a vast ocean, representing the
transcontinental complexity of relationships and networks experienced by those
affected by the Middle Passage – this strategy of cross-fertilization cannot be
incorporated in grand narratives of assimilation or separation but represents the
condition of black cultures everywhere.
Pettinger 93 Alasdair, studied at the Universities of Birmingham and Essex, completing his PhD in Literature in 1988 while
working as a civil servant in London. Since 1992, he has been based in Glasgow, working at the Scottish Music Centre and pursuing
his academic interests as an independent scholar. He has held visiting research fellowships at the University of Central Lancashire
(2000) and Nottingham Trent University (2004-2007) and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Cultures,
Languages and Area Studies at the University of Liverpool (2010-2013). He is the editor of Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black
Atlantic (1998), and has published a number of essays reflecting his (overlapping) interests in travel literature, the cultures of
slavery and abolitionism, and representations of Haiti. His current projects include a study of Frederick Douglass' visit to Scotland
in the 1840s and a history of the word voodoo in English, available from JSTOR, Research in African Literatures, 29.4, pg. 142-44,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820848, ―Enduring Fortresses: A Review of ‗The Black Atlantic‘‖ | ADM
First and foremost, perhaps, the "black Atlantic" is a slogan, a call for a strategic realignment that will
encourage scholars to move away from what Gilroy sees as narrowly national or ethnically exclusive
frames of reference. Because even when they do cross borders and broaden their perspective, there remains a
tendency to think of black expressive cultures in terms of a single narrative trajectory
that runs either back to Africa (the pull of the ancient homeland, if you like) or forwards to (nowadays,
usually) North America (the promise?however distant?of full participa- tion in modernity). Now it may be true
that Gilroy exaggerates the extent to which this tendency has taken hold, but let me provide a few
examples of the kind of approach he might have had in mind. Consider, for instance, James Weldon Johnson's
account of his visit to Haiti in 1920, ostensibly to report on the American occupation. But
Americans hardly figure in his text: he is interested in the "real" Haiti. He saw beautiful villas, inspected the clean,
native huts, and admired the mag- nificent countrywomen. The weather was glorious, the scenery stunning, but the sensation of his
trip was a visit to Christophe's Citadel in the north: In places the walls were from eight to twelve feet thick. Some of the size of the
citadel may be gained from the statement that Christophe built it to quarter thirty thousand soldiers. The more I saw of it, the more
the wonder grew on me not only as to the exe- cution but as to the mere conception of such a work. I should say that it is the most
wonderful ruin in the Western Hemisphere, and, for the amount of human energy and labor sacrificed in its construction, can be
compared to the pyramids of Egypt. As I stood on the highest point, where the sheer drop from the walls was more than 2000 feet,
and looked out over the rich plains of Northern Haiti, I was impressed with the thought that, if ever a man had the right to feel
himself a king, that man was Christophe when he walked around the parapets of his citadel. (352) And secondly by contrast
here is an extract from a rather notorious article written in 1995 by Keith Richburg, reflecting on
three years as African correspondent with the Washington Post. Standing on a bridge in Tanzania, watching
corpses float down a river from Rwanda he comments: I know exacdy the feeling that haunts me, but I've just been too embarrassed
to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it as simply as I can: There but for the grace of God go I. Somewhere, sometime, maybe
400 years ago, an ancestor of mine whose name I'U never know was shackled in leg irons, kept in a dark pit, possibly at Goree
Island off the coast of Senegal, and then put with thousands of other Africans into the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the
long and treacherous journey across the Atlantic. Many of them died along the way, of disease, of hunger. But my ancestor
survived, maybe because he was strong, maybe stubborn enough to want to live, or maybe just lucky. He was ripped away from his
country and his family, forced into slavery somewhere in the Caribbean. Then one of his descendants some- how made it up to
South Carolina, and one of those descendants, my father, made it to Detroit during the Second World War, and there I was born, 36
years ago. And if that original ancestor hadn't been forced to make that horrific journey, I would not have been standing there that
day on the Rusumo Falls bridge, a journalist? a mere spectator?watching the bodies glide past me like river logs. No, I might have
instead been one of them?or have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the coundess ongoing civil wars or tribal
clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made that voyage. (18) Both authors have traveled
extensively and are well aware of the dias- poric dimensions of black expressive
cultures. Yet in these extracts, they allow themselves to reduce these dimensions to well-rehearsed
unidirectional narratives of descent and ascent. The writers offer not so much travel accounts as
extravagant homespun fantasies: they visit foreign lands but the scenarios they evoke are so familiar (Johnson recalls Edmund
Blyden, for instance, while in Richburg one hears an echo of Phillis Wheadey), they hardly seem to have traveled at all. Gilroy
insists that things are a good deal more complicated than this, and his emphasis on the
Atlantic precisely because it lies between these points of anchorage, so to speak furnishes us
with a brilliant metaphor. The diaspora resembles not a river, gathering its tributaries in a relendess
voyage to a final destination, but a vast stretch of water that touches many shores: Africa, Europe,
the Caribbean, and the Americas. None of which, for Gilroy, has any special privilege over the
others; it is the relationships between them that matter, the ways in which they influence each other and become
enmeshed. He deliberately chooses examples of cross-cultural encounters that do not meet the demands of that hyphenated couple,
the African American, by pointing to the central importance of a third term: Europe. Whether it is Du Bois in Hegelian Berlin,
Richard Wright in existentialist Paris, or the restless "travels" implicit in the hybrid creations of contemporary British dance records,
we get a sense of a more diverse and de-centered field of cross-fertilization, which
cannot be accommodated in grand narratives of assimilation or separation. Now many of
the examples he cites have been marginalized by more orthodox scholars, marked out as somehow inauthentic, bracketed off as if
they are not part of the "tradition" if only because of the prevailing institu? tional division of academic labor. But I don't think Gilroy
is just asking us to reconsider their application for membership of that tradition, as if the "black atlantic" is just another cultural
world searching for recognition alongside more "solid" entities such as North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and so on. On the
contrary, I think he is suggesting that the hybrid, restless character of the literary and musical forms
he discusses are typical – that they represent the normal condition of black cultures everywhere. The
implica- tion is that even the least promising site – the remotest village or the busiest financial headquarters – turns
out on closer analysis to be intersected by a range of transcontinental networks (recognizably
"black" if not purely so) without which they cannot be fully understood. These networks of information, mutual
aid, emotional solidarity, political collaboration would include the abolitionist
movement; the many initiatives embraced by the term Pan-African', syncretic cultural formations
such as vodun, cricket, or jazz; and the traveling, mailing, and phoning that keep the members of extended diasporic
families in touch with each other. If this is the case, then the "black Atlantic" is not about
evening things up?if you like?between the national and the international, the pure and the
corrupt, the hardcore and the sell-out, but challenging these very distinctions altogether.
Our vision of the black Atlantic presents the Middle Passage as a historical
experience that offers redemption and liberation through remembrance – this
unique, individualized reconstruction builds insubordinate racial countercultures
and oppositional identities
Murray 05 Rolland D., Associate Professor of English at Brown University, author of Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black
Power, and Masculine Ideology (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). His current project considers the impact of postidentity politics on
contemporary African American culture. His essays have been published in such journals as the Yale Journal of Criticism,
Contemporary Literature, and Callaloo. He has been awarded fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as the
Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, available from Project MUSE,
Contemporary Literature, 46.1, pg. 58-59, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_literature/v046/46.1murray.html, ―Diaspora
by Bus: Reginald McKnight, Postmodernism, and Transatlantic Subjectivity‖ | ADM
Evan's encounter with slavery thus tracks a far more unstable play between the present and the recollection of the slave past than
do some of our most sophisticated contemporary meditations on this matter. Works as intricate as Paul Gilroy's The
Black Atlantic and as polyvocal as Toni Morrison's Beloved present the Middle Passage and slavery as
a historical experience that offers redemption and even liberation to those who
remember it. Gilroy argues that from the nineteenth century forward, New World blacks have
reconstructed slavery through "storytelling and music making" in order to build "insubordinate racial
countercultures" (200). In this view, the reproduction of cultural practices that sustained
blacks from the edges of the Middle Passage through enslavement has been
instrumental in forging oppositional racial identities and emancipatory cultural
practices throughout the diaspora. A related investment in the redemptive also shapes Morrison's Beloved, a work that tells the
story of a child, Beloved, who is murdered by her slave mother, Sethe. When the murdered child's ghost returns in the body of a
young woman, only by grappling with this phantom incarnation of slavery do the novel's characters truly realize themselves as
both autonomous subjects and members of a black collective. This logic governs a climactic scene in which a group of black women
come to Sethe's home to rid the family of Beloved's ghost. When the women begin to sing outside the house, their voices converge
in a chorus that builds into "a wave wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe like
a baptism" (261). For Sethe, the women's collective confrontation with the ghost proves a liberatory cleansing. That is, despite the
havoc produced by Beloved, Sethe's eventual autonomy, her recognition that she is her own "best thing," transpires because she
recollects theslave past. And only as the community itself engages with theembodiment of its slave past is it able to consolidate its
collective identity, its voice. Animating the projects of Morrison and Gilroy, then, is an impulse to frame
remembrance as a political gesture with extraordinary therapeutic and emancipatory
potential. Alternately, McKnight's novel seems to resist such strategies, for Evan's disorienting encounter with the legacy of
slavery only forces him to recognize the bursts of half-legible signs that render him a mystery to himself. Slavery occasions
individual reflection [End Page 58] on the historical grounds that constitute being but not a
cathartic resolution of past crisis. This refusal to posit slavery as an avenue toward redemption prompts the
question of what alternative the novel poses to the diasporic imaginings of the past century. What else might be
adumbrated in considering a black identity that is fundamentally without a homeland,
dispersed, as it were, in the Atlantic? Toward the end of his search for origins, Evan struggles to answer a
similar question, and his efforts lead him back to the sea: I bleed my way from Africa to America. In time I will no longer be able to
hold each particle together. The slow boil of the ocean will break me down, atom by atom. . . . My consciousness will rise up like
vapor, will steam and roll, half-invisible, far into the sky, get caught up in the clouds, choke them till they can hold no more of me.
The clouds will cast me down in a silent dry rain. I will hang in the air, between sky and soil, sky and sea, floating in disjointed
voiceless madness for all eternity. The wind will rise and push these fragments around the circuits of the world. Everywhere,
people will breath my hunger, grow dizzy with the pangs of emptiness, consume one another. There is never enough to go all the
way around. Look out for the hungry ones. (220–21) This breathtaking depiction of a self in the throes of dissolution offers a canny
synthesis of the aesthetic and political project of the novel. There is a note of euphoria in Evan's account of his madness that echoes
the pleasure the novel takes in displacing conventional renderings of diasporic identity. The novel builds a world in which the
effect of diasporic ideology is in perpetual suspension, a space in which one can
imagine the diasporic subject's hunger for roots with out having to identify with the
particular ideologies constructed to realize that rootedness.

Specifically, the affirmative challenges dichotomies, such as the notions of national
and international, local and global, origins and diaspora, to rethink relations,
redefine identity, and truly produce an emancipatory future
Goyal, 10 – [Yogita, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Romance,
Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge, 2010), ―The Gender of Diaspora in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby‖ (Modern Fiction
Studies, 2006), and ―Theorizing Africa in Black Diaspora Studies: Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River‖ (Diaspora, 2003). She is
currently working on a comparative study of neo-slave narratives and post-apartheid fiction. ―Towards an African Atlantic: Ama
Ata Aidoo's diasporic theater‖ // JW]
In both plays, Aidoo remains politically committed to the idea of Africa without at any point
trying to revive either Afrocentric romances or nationalist dogma. Instead, she explicitly
critiques nostalgic visions of an idyllic African past and strives to highlight fault lines
in the African past, especially in her consistent meditation on slavery. She also refuses
the temporal imperative of developmental or modernist accounts of African uplift. In
this way, Aidoo's works redefine the basis for a true national identity by parsing the
notion of tradition and asking for historical accountability both within national
memory and diasporic memory, as well as in relation to the neocolonial world order.
Her post-colonial manifestos insist that we have to reckon with colonial history, with
the transatlantic and trans-Saharan slave trade, and at the same time put in play
important questions of gender as irreducible components of any meaningful analysis of
the African past and present. In doing so, she articulates a solid critique of colonialism,
rendering it not a providential advent of modernity but a catastrophic rupture of
African history. In her works, the past is neither static nor to be surpassed, but rather
something to be made usable, as a resource for the challenges of the present and the
future. She thus imagines a dialectical relation between the local and the global, the
historical and the contemporary, Africa and the diaspora. Aidoo's plays negotiate the
twin pulls of tradition and modernity in ways that are neither Afrocentric nor essentialist,
thus revealing the restrictive understanding of these terms in influential theories of diaspora and the black Atlantic. Aidoo reframes
two key coordinates of Gilroy's work. First, in The Dilemma of a Ghost, she provides historical depth and
texture to narratives of return influential in the cultural nationalist moment of the 1960s
and 1970s, showing how transnational encounters are subtly shaped by forces of
gender, tradition, and kinship, laying out the difficulty of forging transnational
connections, but also the promise of true empathy across cultural boundaries. Second, in
Anowa, she reframes the question of transatlantic slavery from an African perspective,
linking together questions of gender oppression, colonialism, and slavery. Her plays
thus call for developing newer and more flexible models of diaspora that are attuned to
past efforts at conceiving black culture in a transnational vein, not against such models.
Gilroy's paradigm of the black Atlantic is centrally anchored by a reading of the continued reverberation of the time of slavery in
contemporary black political culture. He emphasizes the redemptive power of suffering and the memory of slavery. Aidoo
stretches the somewhat restrictive understanding of memory Gilroy works with by offering a textured representation
of tradition as it interacts with everyday life, as well as by showing how the public and
private spheres or the personal and political intermingle and are themselves
transformed in such interactions. Neither a pre-colonial idyll nor a post-colonial
dystopia, the African landscapes she represents in her body of work speak to the
complex temporal folds inhabited by modern African subjects, particularly women, as
they mediate competing pulls of tradition and modernity without positing the two as
irreconcilable dichotomies. In doing so, she proves Fanon's conclusion that ―it is at the
heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows,‖28 as
there can be meaningful dialogue between Africa and the diaspora, but only when both
difference and similarity are acknowledged, and when political and cultural needs
can combine to produce an emancipatory vision of the future.
Exploring the black Atlantic represents a counterculture of modernity that avoids
the hegemony of the nation-state and explores the profound dislocation and fluidity
of national, religious, and ethnic identity initiated by chattel slavery – this analysis
calls into question and attempts to resolve paradigms of identity
Elmer 5 Jonathan, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, he has published on Jefferson, Poe, Wright, and Lacan,
and is completing a book titled On Lingering and Being Last: Race, Sovereignty, and Archive, available from Project MUSE, American
Literary History, 17.1, pg 165-67, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v017/17.1elmer.html#authbio, ―The
Black Atlantic Archive‖ | ADM
"Face Zion Forward" is a collection of primary documents from the late eighteenth century, several of
them already printed elsewhere, introduced by a scholarly introduction; its focus is the post-Revolutionary
black loyalist diaspora, tracking the movements of Marrant, Boston King, and David George as they move into
and out of a dangerous revolutionary environment that more or less forces them to seek
community in extranational ways, through the development of patronage in England and through the black
community-building projects in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. The texts in Brooks and Saillant "represent a foundational moment in
black Atlantic intellectual history, a moment that generated two essential modes of black thought about Africa. The first imagined
Africa as a place to be redeemed through emigration, colonization, and proselytization by once-enslaved Christian blacks, and the
second conceived of Africa as a recollected group consciousness among the members of the modern black diaspora" (18–19).
Gilroy had argued for a black Atlantic "counterculture of modernity" that evaded the
hegemony of the nation-form, but nationalist impulses were never far from view; indeed,
he began his study by exploring the powerful hold of black [End Page 165] nationalist thought in
the career of Martin R. Delaney. The authors in "Face Zion Forward" further complicate the idea that black
Atlantic writers set themselves against the idea of nation, having little to gain from it. On the contrary,
Brooks and Saillant reiterate the familiar point that "[t]he move to Sierra Leone occurred just as a crucial link of the modern world
was being forged: the creation of nations through democratic revolution and an attack on unfreedom, whether it was the bondage of
the colonist, of the citizen without representation, or of the slave" (13). The entire question of national
identification on the part of early black Atlantic figures remains to be sorted out. Black
loyalists during the American Revolution may have taken their position because the British offered
them their freedom, or because they found the colonies more systemically brutal toward
blacks, or because they felt some degree of patriotic allegiance to the Crown. When Equiano gains his
manumission, he longs to return home—to England. Is this a rhetorical ploy from this most sophisticated of black Atlantic writers,
or an expression of true sentiment? Jeffrey Bolster, in Blacks Jacks (1997), presents some fascinating material about black sailors
during the War of 1812 choosing prison in England over impressment on ships engaged in battle with their fellow Americans: was
this defiance of the English an expression of patriotism, a calculation that prison was all in all a safer place
to be, or, as Bolster speculates, a "rear-guard action to disavow blacks' defilement in the [US]
national imagination and todefy the popular fusion of republicanism and whiteness that
increasingly defined American citizenship by excluding people of color" (115)? These narratives by black writers of the
eighteenth century and early nineteenth century are so fascinating in part because they show how difficult it is to
answer such questions. Most of these narratives focus resolutely on the vagaries of
experience and present a world of such profound dislocation, risk, and contingency that
we are forced to acknowledge that questions of national, religious, and ethnic identity
are very often up for grabs according to the pressures of the moment. To focus on local environments of risk expands
our analytic frame, in one sense: thus, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's emphasis, in The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), on
social terror and natural risk allows them to argue for the existence of a multiethnic early modern proletariat dispersed across the
Atlantic world. But it also narrows our focus to suggest how experience and its discursive codification emerge in resolutely
contingent environments, emerge, that is, as essentially volatile and thus revisable. Does Equiano's having listed his birthplace as
Carolina represent a truth that his Interesting Narrative revises, or are these two documents themselves the revision enacted under
a local pressure we can only guess at? We [End Page 166] tend to think of chattel slavery as a kind of
ontological divide, but the texts reprinted and discussed in these books remind us that slave had a more
unstable meaning at this time. Part of this is the result of complex interactions between
discourses: slave could always mean— and often did—slave to sin; it could also mean simply laboring, as in Equiano's remark
that, after his manumission, he "consented to slave on as before" (141). Such ambiguities crop up in biographical details, as well:
Marrant was born free, but did he, as Carretta has suggested, have a slave himself (Unchained Voices 129n9)? Was Briton Hammon
a slave to his "master," General Winslow, or merely a servant (Carretta argues the latter [Unchained Voices 24])? Robert Desrochers,
Jr., is surely right to place such uncertainties in a larger world of "hierarchies of servitude": Hammon was a "man with a
demonstrated knack for staying alive and optimizing personal security and relative freedom in an Atlantic world governed by
hierarchies of servitude" (159), and his Narrative is "a portrait of a man struggling to maintain and extend personal sovereignty
under less than ideal circumstances" (Caretta and Gould, Genius 159). What these ambiguities point to, it seems to
me, is that while the work on the black Atlantic has done much to call into question the
explanatory paradigms of nation and ethnic identity, we have not yet settled on new
paradigms to help us move beyond merely raising such problems to an attempt to
resolve them in some interpretively satisfying way.
The distinct individual memories of Atlantic slavery are important – alternative
approaches that instead rely upon a shared history fail to appreciate the unique
dislocation of black history caused by chattel slavery and give rise to violent
absolutism
Pettinger 93 Alasdair, studied at the Universities of Birmingham and Essex, completing his PhD in Literature in 1988 while
working as a civil servant in London. Since 1992, he has been based in Glasgow, working at the Scottish Music Centre and pursuing
his academic interests as an independent scholar. He has held visiting research fellowships at the University of Central Lancashire
(2000) and Nottingham Trent University (2004-2007) and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Cultures,
Languages and Area Studies at the University of Liverpool (2010-2013). He is the editor of Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black
Atlantic (1998), and has published a number of essays reflecting his (overlapping) interests in travel literature, the cultures of
slavery and abolitionism, and representations of Haiti. His current projects include a study of Frederick Douglass' visit to Scotland
in the 1840s and a history of the word voodoo in English, available from JSTOR, Research in African Literatures, 29.4, pg. 145,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820848, ―Enduring Fortresses: A Review of ‗The Black Atlantic‘‖ | ADM
He tackles this question in at least two different ways. One argument, which is not really developed in any detail, rests on the
notion that the "black atlantic" is grounded in memory. He thinks the unity of the "black
atlantic" is to be found in memory rather than a shared history. He does so, I think, because
history does not leave enough room for agency. The "black atlantic" is not simply a
product of circumstances, but a creative response to them; it is an articulation of the past rather than a
legacy one inherits. But I think his argument only works to the extent that memory is understood in strictly cultural terms. Gilroy
tends to see memory as an act of conscious will. Someone more sympathetic to psychoanalysis, though, might be more cautious
here, as is Jacqueline Rose in her excellent recent book States of Fantasy. Drawing on the concept of "trans-generational haunt- ing,"
she suggests that this might help explain and remind us of the tenacity of national identifications. (She is particularly concerned
with the conflicts in South Africa and the Middle East.) Rooted in traumas of dis- possession in the distant past, transmitting and
repeating themselves across time, they cannot simply be shrugged off: one cannot choose one's
memories as a people any more than one can as an individual. All the talk of invented traditions and
imagined communities has fostered the impression that the past is merely a cultural construct; the psychical
unconscious forces that these constructions must take into account have gone largely
unacknowledged. Gilroy sees the currently fashionable theories of Afrocentrism as
suffering from a kind of amnesia. They fail to appreciate the extent to which black
history was dislocated by Atlantic slavery when they insist on a fundamental
continuity that runs from precolonial Africa to the present, as if one can simply return (if
only in spirit) to the status quo ante, typically repre? sented by the Egyptian pyramids, although the equally huge and
inde- structible Citadel "built" by Henri Christophe may serve almost as well. If James Weldon Johnson's name is not the first to
come to mind in this con? nection, the Haitian fantasy woven in his autobiography clearly belongs to
the sort of approach under attack here. But if Rose is right, then such fantasies are forms of
remembrance after all. Their very extravagance is testimony to the effects of the trauma of
dis- possession. It gives rise to absolutist yearnings for justice that take (often violent)
forms that we cannot easily control. The attempts to come to terms with the inheritance of "racial terror"
in more reasonable, non-nationalistic ways, are harder than is commonly supposed. In fact, the ghost of
nationalism and ethnic particularism haunts Gilroy's own text, as I will try to show.
Independently, our exploration of the Black Atlantic opens space for a Black
Internationalism that struggles for universal emancipation. Traditional scholarly
methods have marginalized and suppressed this Black intellectual tradition. The
affirmative challenges this intellectual segregation by refusing to take the nation-
state as its unit of analysis and resisting demands for particularized analysis.
Reclaiming and advancing the Black Internationalist counter-narrative effectively
challenges white supremacy.
West and Martin 9 — Michael O. West, Professor in the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University, holds a Ph.D.
in History from Harvard University, and William G. Martin, Professor in the Department of Sociology at Binghamton University,
holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton, 2009 (―Introduction: Contours of the Black
International From Toussaint to Tupac,‖ From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution, Edited By Michael
O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, Published by the University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 9780807833094, p.
1-4)
This volume is an act of recuperation. It seeks to reclaim and advance an old, but largely
unheralded, story of black struggles worldwide. The subject, in brief, is black
internationalism. The black international, we argue, has a single defining characteristic:
struggle. Yet struggle, resistance to oppression by black folk, did not mechanically
produce black internationalism. Rather, black internationalism is a product of
consciousness, that is, the conscious interconnection and interlocution of black struggles
across man-made and natural boundaries—including the boundaries of nations,
empires, continents, oceans, and seas. From the outset, black internationalism envisioned a
circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time.1 It is a vision personified,
respectively, by the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture and the U.S. rap impresario Tupac Shakur, the one
illustrating the struggles against slavery and the other signifying contemporary cultural
insurgencies.¶ Our collection examines a variety of events and movements that manifest the multilayered and interconnected
character of black internationalism. First, the essays show the emergence of black traditions of struggle and resistance in particular
localities. Second, the contributions demonstrate how local struggles intersected with one another across diverse boundaries to
form, loosely and informally, a black international that was greater than the sum total of its constituent parts. Third, the black
international, in its turn, variously quickened, inspired, and stimulated local struggles. These essays chart aspects of that black
internationalist resistance, from the onset of modern capitalism to the current postmodern era, in sum, since the Age of
Revolution.2¶ Historical scholarship, including most of the writings on black experiences, has not been kind to
black internationalism. Two dominant scholarly traditions, [end page 1] the metanarrative and the
national narrative, have intellectually marginalized the black international. The
metanarrative, despite its vaunted claim to universality, pays scant attention to most of humanity
outside the white Atlantic, while the national narrative, with its singular focus on the
nationstate, is largely oblivious to transnational concerns.3 Caught between these two
hegemons—the Eurocentric metanarrative and the exclusivist national narrative—the discourse of black
internationalism, although never fully silenced, has been much muted.¶ The recuperation we
attempt in this volume necessarily runs counter to the dominant master narrative, whether in the
form of the metanarrative or of the national narrative. Contrary to the existing literature on social
movements and revolutions,4 we argue that black movements have been a leading force
in the search for emancipation since at least the second half of the eighteenth century.
In contrast to those who celebrate globalization as a new phenomenon,5 we maintain
that black movements have long imagined and operated on a world scale. Against the
master narrative, we posit that successive waves of black international struggles have
countered, shaped, and at times destroyed central pillars of capital and empire, racial
as well as political. In short, the story of the black international requires nothing less than a
rethinking of received wisdom about life under capitalism over the long durée—and the
possibility of alternative social worlds in the past and the future.¶ Our project, as noted, is more
reclamation than innovation. Black activists, scholars, and movements have long made many of the claims we sketch here, in broad
outline if not in specific detail.6 But the master narrative, as produced especially in the historically
white academy, has steadily and effectively effaced the black internationalist
counternarrative. Thus we have been told of an ―Age of Revolution‖ with little, if any, mention of the Haitian Revolution.
Repeatedly, we hear stories of twentieth-century revolutions that conveniently elide
black internationalism. Incessantly, we are regaled with praise poems about the good,
nonviolent 1960s and the new social movements it spawned, with scant reference to
their black internationalist antecedents.¶ In our own time, the erasure of global black
histories, which is to say the story of the black international, may be attributed
primarily to the remaking of the Western academy, and especially the U.S. academy, after World War II.
The demands of the Cold War, as determined by the national security state, gave rise to a new
Orientalist-style branch of knowledge, area studies, of which African studies was a
component part. African studies, as we have argued else [end page 2] where,7 separated and isolated
continental Africa from black North America, and both from the Caribbean and Latin
America. Thus did an iron curtain, to appropriate a formulation made famous elsewhere, descend over
the study of African peoples. With the possible exception of Atlantic slavery, the resulting intellectual
segregation generally precluded investigation of shared black or African experiences,
much less shared black struggles for emancipation across nations and empires,
continents and oceans. Accordingly, black studies in North America, which emerged out of later
struggles in the 1960s and 1970s,8 were increasingly confined to a narrower, national locale. Likewise,
black British studies remained separate from African studies in the British academy, just as African American studies and African
studies were distinct areas of inquiry in the leading U.S. universities.9 Taking the nation-state as the unit of
analysis, and utilizing a comparative method that required isolated cases, the Cold War
academy effectively ruled out the notion of a black international that cohered the
freedom struggles of African peoples globally.¶ But no condition, it has been noted, is permanent. More
recent scholarship, driven by forces as diverse as the Afrocentric protests of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War, has challenged
the master narrative, including the African studies one.10 By the beginning of the new millennium, more and more scholars and
activists were being drawn to the connections, old and new, between peoples and movements across the globe. As area studies and
African studies receded, along with the Cold War, insurgent forces within and without the academy forged new ties between the
previously discrete fields of African, African American, Caribbean, Latin American, and Black European studies. These trends
resulted in the appearance of new journals (e.g., Contours, Diaspora, and Black Renaissance), new Ph.D. programs in diaspora and
Africana studies, and new conferences and associations dedicated to the black world (e.g., the Association for the Study of the
Worldwide African Diaspora). The resulting synergy has, among other things, sparked renewed interest in the forces —ideological,
cultural, and organizational —that have long linked black life and activity in various parts of the globe.11¶ The studies brought
together in this volume represent some of the first fruit of the most recent labor. Collectively, they demonstrate the multiple and
complex ways in which local black struggles and revolts have been conjoined to larger processes and movements among black folk
here and there,12 such that one can credibly speak of globally connected waves of struggles by African peoples over the past two
and half centuries. These struggles, and their [end page 3] cumulative effect, are fundamental to a full accounting of the early
formation and transformation of capitalism in the Atlantic world, specifically, and more generally to the story of humankind in the
modern world.¶ Such a project, furthermore, recovers a past within the world of activist scholarship. Already at the turn
of the twentieth century, circles of movements and bodies of scholarship had emerged
with a common mission: to challenge scientific racism worldwide, to contest
colonialism and its reputed civilizing mission in Africa and the Caribbean, and to
confront new forms of racial oppression in postemancipation societies such as the
United States, Brazil, and Cuba.13 These antinomian expressions, in turn, were built on still
older traditions of common resistance, traditions that date back to the second half of the eighteenth century. In
that era of ferment throughout the Atlantic world, local struggles for emancipation,
although expressing a wide range of lived experiences in specific societies, began to
link together in a broad insurgency against imperial and racial orders.14 The linkages were
forged amid the iconic movements of the modern North Atlantic, notably the Enlightenment, the Evangelical Revival, and the U.S.,
French, and Haitian revolutions. These were not just European and European-settler phenomena but, rather, world-historical events
that were fundamentally shaped by the African agency and the African presence, literal and figurative. Such lines of
inquiry, however, were largely foreclosed by the post–World War II rise of U.S. hegemony
and, more specifically, by what it wrought: area and African studies. Exiled from the mainstream
academy, black counternarratives were literally driven underground.¶ Reclaiming and
advancing that intellectual tradition is a huge task, one that will have to be collaborative
and can only be achieved over the long haul. We certainly make no pretense here of offering anything
approximating a comprehensive accounting of the emergence and evolution of black internationalism. What we attempt, rather, is a
rough outline of such a project and its promise. Our volume unearths moments when struggles against a racially ordered world
system coalesced, creating black international moments of considerable —and often violent —force. In so doing, we claim
uniformity of neither conditions, identities, nor movements; just the contrary, racial
identities and forms of protest varied over space and time. The notion of black or
African remained in constant flux, changing over time. At certain moments, however,
racial struggles and identities cohered across vast masses of land and bodies of water,
challenging and changing dominant modes of white supremacy. The volume focuses on three such
moments of black internationalism —and their legacy.
Debate must be reconstructed through the slave’s point of view – a lens of cultural
hybridity breaks down dyads that pervade critical and political discourse and
animate debates about race, gender, and nation. We control uniqueness because all
sides of political opinion have systematically obscured hybridity, reinforcing
cultural nationalism and an immutable black-white binary.
McBride 95 Dwight, Dean of The Graduate School & Associate Provost at Northwestern University, Daniel Hale Williams
Professor of African American Studies, English, & Performance Studies, available from Project MUSE, Modern Fiction Studies, 41.2,
pg 388-91, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v041/41.2br_gilroy.html, ―The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness‖ | ADM
Dyads like essentialism/constructionism, sexism/feminism and nationalism/pluralism
proliferate much of contemporary critical and political discourse in the academy. They animate
debates around race, gender, nation, and even issues as large in scope as the character
of modernity. In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy, through his use of the metaphor of "the black atlantic,"
demonstrates that such dyads are not only reductive and finally limiting, but that any true
understanding of black atlantic culture must recognize and account for its very
hybridity. For Gilroy, any serious study of black atlantic culture must include the influences of
the European as well as the African American cultures. In the very first chapter, Gilroy tells us that "commentators
from all sides of political opinion" have "systematically obscured" the existence of the very evident
cultural hybridity that he argues for in The Black Atlantic. Gilroy, characterizing the state of contemporary political and intellectual discourses about ethnic cultures, states that
Regardless of their affiliation to the right, left, or centre, groups have fallen back on the idea of cultural
nationalism, on the overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable,
ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of "black" and
"white" people. Against this choice stands another, more difficult option: the theorisation of creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and
hybridity. From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, this would [End Page 388] be a litany of pollution
and impurity. These terms are rather unsatisfactory ways of naming the process of cultural
mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents. Based on these ideas, what Gilroy
offers in The Black Atlantic is a practice for "reading" the cultural production of the black atlantic-with examples ranging from slave narratives and novels to hip-hop. Many reviewers of this text mention Gilroy's
masterful reading, in chapter 2, of Frederick Douglass as the "progenitor of black nationalism," commenting on how Douglass and others, by raising the issue of slavery as they do, complicate circulating, nascent
theories of modernity. Gilroy clearly calls for a reconstruction of "the primal history of modernity from
the slave's point of view." He demonstrates, through a thorough reading of Douglass along with an impressive subset of related texts, that when the idea
of history as progress (the dominant paradigm in Western historiography) confronts the lived and narrative critique of
the slave, our understanding of "progress" has to be completely rethought along with
our understanding of "modernity." Other reviewers laud Gilroy's evaluation of black atlantic musical production from spirituals to rap, reminding us that the
slave's access to literacy was often denied on pain of death and only a few cultural opportunities were offered as a surrogate for the other forms of individual autonomy denied by life on the plantation and in the
barracoons. Music becomes vital at the point at which linguistic and semantic indeterminacy/polyphony arise amidst the protracted battle between masters, mistresses, and slaves. In this vein, Gilroy makes a
larger argument about the music of the black atlantic being the medium that can respond to the poststructuralist overdetermined concern with textuality and the impossibility of any unmediated representation.
He argues that "black musical expression has played a role in reproducing . . . a distinctive
counterculture of modernity." In his consideration of black musical development he moves
beyond an understanding of cultural processes which . . . is currently torn between seeing them
either as the expression of an essential, unchanging, sovereign racial self or as [End Page 389] the
effluent from a constituted subjectivity that emerges contingently from the endless play
of racial signification. This is usually conceived solely in terms of the inappropriate model which textuality provides. The vitality and complexity of this musical culture offers a
means to get beyond the related oppositions between essentialists and pseudo-pluralists on the one hand and between totalising conceptions of tradition, modernity and post-modernity on the other. It also
provides a model of performance which can supplement and partially displace concern with textuality. Gilroy's brilliantly executed readings of musical artists in chapter 3 include such varied examples as the
Fisk University Jubilee Singers, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis and 2 Live Crew. Still other critics notice the new readings of W. E. B. Du Bois (chapter 4) and Richard Wright (chapter 5) that Gilroy articulates.
While Gilroy's reasons for including Du Bois are certainly clear, the reasons for the inclusion of Wright may not be for some readers. Gilroy includes a discussion of Wright here because he is "the first black writer
to be put forward as a major figure in world literature." His re-evaluation of Wright centers on taking seriously the depth of Wright's philosophical interests, which have been "either overlooked or misconceived
by the almost exclusively literary enquiries that have dominated analysis of [Wright's] writing." Gilroy makes several rhetorical moves to achieve this aim, including comparing Wright's understanding of human
progress to that of Nietzsche and reading Wright against Du Bois. He provides a thoughtful overview of Wright's Marxism and his involvement with the Communist party. He also defends, with readings of The
Outsider and The Long Dream, against claims made by Arnold Rampersad and other critics that Wright's literary career took a turn for the worse with his expatriation to Paris. And perhaps most interesting,
Gilroy interrogates what he sees as the glossing and/or reducing of the debates between Zora Neale
Hurston and Wright over the uses of "the folk" in art as well as Wright's representations of
black women in his work to mere "misogyny." Citing critics Barbara Johnson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as examples of those participating in discussions of Wright as
a misogynist, Gilroy moves to provide a re-mapping of that critical historical terrain upon which such arguments have been made. Gilroy's conclusions here are
startling and [End Page 390] demand serious re-thinking on the reader's part of this crucial debate in the history of
African American letters. In addition to these major figures often cited in reviews of Gilroy's text are a host of others that receive brief critical attention. For example, in chapter
1 Gilroy produces an extremely rich reading of Martin Delany's The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered and his Blake. In chapter 6 we
get a reading of the Margaret Garner story (which was the basis for Toni Morrison's Beloved) and of the positionality of slave women.

Case
Solvency
Black Atlantic solvency.
Gilroy, 93 – [Paul, holds the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics, ―The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness‖ // JW]
In opposition to both of these nationalist or ethnically absolute approaches, I want to develop
the suggestion that cultural historians could take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit
of analysis in their discussions of the modern world and use it to produce an explicitly
transnational and intercultural perspectives" Apart from the confrontation with English historiography and
literary history this entails a challenge to the ways in which black American cultural and political histories have so Far been
conceived. I want to suggest that much of the precious intellectual legacy claimed by African-
American intellectuals as the substance of their particularity is in fact only partly their
absolute ethnic property. No less than in the case of the English New Left, the idea of the
black Atlantic can be used to show that there are other claims to it which can be based
on the structure of the African diaspora into the western hemisphere. A concern with
the Atlantic as a cultural and political system has been forced on black historiography
and intellectual history by the economic and historical matrix in which plantation
slavery—―capitalism with its clothes of‖—was one special moment. The fractal patterns of
Cultural and political exchange and transformation that we try and specify through manifestly
inadequate theoretical terms like creolisation and syncretism indicate how both ethnicities and political
cultures have been made anew in ways that are significant not simply for the peoples of
the Caribbean but for Europe, for Africa, especially Liberia and Sierra Leone, and of course, for
black America.
Agency Impact
Impact card maybe – agency
Gilroy, 93 – [Paul, holds the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics, ―The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness‖ // JW]
Any satisfaction to be experienced from the recent spectacular growth of cultural studies as an academic
project should not obscure its conspicuous problems with ethnocentrism and nationalism.
Understanding these difficulties might commence with a critical evaluation of the ways in
which notions of ethnicity have been mobilised, often by default rather than design, as part of the
distinctive hermeneutics of cultural studies or with the unthinking assumption that
cultures always flow into patterns congruent with the borders of essentially homogeneous
nation states. The marketing and inevitable reification of cultural studies as a discrete academic subject also has what might
be called a secondary ethnic aspect. The project of cultural studies is a more or less attractive
candidate for institutionalization according to the ethnic garb in which it appears. The
question of whose cultures are being studied is therefore an important one, as is the
issue of where the instruments which will make that study possible are going to come
from. In these circumstances it is hard not to wonder how much of the recent international
enthusiasm for cultural studies is generated by its profound associations with England
and ideas of Englishness. This possibility can be used as a point of entry into consideration
of the ethnohistorical specificity of the discourse of cultural studies itself. Looking at
cultural studies from an ethnohistorical perspective requires more than just noting its
association with English literature, history, and New Left politics. It necessitates
constructing an account of the borrowings made by these English initiatives from wider,
modem, European traditions of thinking about culture, and at every stage examining the
place which these cultural perspectives provide for the images of their racialised others
as objects of knowledge, power, and cultural criticism. It is imperative, though very hard, to
combine thinking about these issues with consideration of the pressing need to get
black cultural expressions, analyses, and histories taken seriously in academic circles
rather than assigning via the idea of "race relations" to sociology and thence abandoned
to the elephants' graveyard to which intractable policy issues go to await their expiry. These
two important conversations pull in different directions and sometimes threaten to cancel each other out, but it is the
struggle to have blacks perceived as agents, as people with cognitive capacities and
even with an intellectual history—attributes denied by modem racism-that is for me
the primary reason for writing this book. It provides a valuable warrant for questioning some
of the ways in which ethnicity is appealed-to in the English idioms of cultural theory and
history, and in the scholarly productions of black America. Understanding the political culture
of blacks in Britain demands close attention to both these traditions. This book is situated on their cusp.
Potential Music Solvency
Hybridity in music
Gilroy, 93 – [Paul, holds the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics, ―The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness‖ // JW]
The musics of the black Atlantic world were the primary expressions of cultural
distinctiveness which this population seized upon and adapted to its new
circumstances. It used the separate but converging musical traditions of the black
Atlantic world, if not to create itself anew as a conglomeration of black communities,
then as a means to gauge the social progress of spontaneous self-creation which was
sedimented together by the endless pressures of economic exploitation, political racism,
displacement, and exile. This musical heritage gradually became an important factor in facilitating
the transition of diverse settlers to a distinct mode of lived blackness. It was
instrumental in producing a constellation of subject positions that was openly indebted for
its conditions of possibility to the Caribbean, the United States, and even Africa. It was
also indelibly marked by the British conditions in which it grew and matured. It is essential to
appreciate that this type of process has not been confined to settlers of Afro-Caribbean
descent. In reinventing their own ethnicity, some of Britain's Asian settlers have also
borrowed the sound-system culture of the Caribbean and the soul and hip hop styles of
black America" as well as techniques like mixing, scratching, and sampling as part of their invention of a new mode of cultural production
with an identity to match.18 The popularity of Apache Indian and Bally Sagoo's attempts to fuse
Punjabi music and language with reggae music and ragamuffin style raised debates
about the authenticity of these hybrid cultural forms to an unprecedented pitch. The
experience of Caribbean migrants to Britain provides further examples of complex
cultural exchange and of the ways in which a self-consciously synthetic culture can
support some equally novel political identities. The cultural and political histories of
Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad, and St. Lucia, like the economic forces at
work in generating their respective migrations to Europe, are widely dissimilar. Even if it
were possible, let alone desirable, their synthesis into a single black British culture could never have
been guaranteed by the effects of racism alone. Thus the role of external meanings
around blackness, drawn in particular from black America, became important in the
elaboration of a connective culture which drew these different "national" groups
together into a new pattern that was not ethnically marked in the way that their
Caribbean cultural inheritances had been. Reggae, a supposedly stable and authentic
category, provides a useful example here. Once its own hybrid origins in rhythm and blues
were effectively concealed, it ceased, in Britain, to signify an exclusively ethnic,
Jamaican style and derived a different kind of cultural legitimacy both from a new
global status and from its expression of what might be termed a pan-Caribbean culture.

Gilroy, 93 – [Paul, holds the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics, ―The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness‖ // JW]
These links show no sign of fading, but the dependence of blacks in Britain on black
cultures produced in the new world has recently begun to change. The current popularity of
Jazzie B and Soul II Soul, Maxi Priest, Caron Wheeler, Monie Love, the Young Disciples,
and others in the United States confirms that during the eighties black British cultures
ceased to simply mimic or reproduce wholesale forms, styles, and genres which had
been lovingly borrowed respectfully stolen, or brazenly highjacked from blacks
elsewhere. Critical space/time cartography of the diaspora needs therefore to be
readjusted so that the dynamics of dispersal and local autonomy can be shown
alongside the unforeseen detours and circuits which mark the new journeys and new
arrivals that, in turn, release new political and cultural possibilities.27 ) At certain points during
the recent past, British racism has generated turbulent economic, ideological, and political
forces that have seemed to act upon the people they oppressed by concentrating their
cultural identities into a single powerful configuration. Whether these people of African,
Caribbean, or Asian descent, their commonality was often defined by its reference to the
central, irreducible sign of their common racial subordination the colour black. More
recently, though, this fragile unity in action has fragmented and their self-conception has
separated into its various constituent elements. The unifYing notion of an open
blackness has been largely rejected and replaced by more particularistic conceptions of
cultural difference. This retreat from a politically constructed notion of racial solidarity
has initiated a compensatory recovery of narrowly ethnic culture and identity. Indeed, the
aura of authentic ethnicity supplies a special form of comfort in a situation where the
very historicity of black experience is constantly undermined.

Black Atlantic music solvency
Gilroy, 93 – [Paul, holds the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics, ―The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness‖// JW]
Music and its rituals can be used to create a model whereby identity can be understood
neither as a fixed essence nor as a vague and utterly contingent construction to be
reinvented by the will and whim of aesthetes, symbolists, and language garners. Black
identity is not simply a social and political category to be used or abandoned according
to the extent to which the rhetoric that supports and legitimises it is persuasive or
institutionally powerful. Whatever the radical constructionists may say, it is lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential
sense of self. Though it is often felt to be natural and spontaneous, it remains the outcome of
practical activity: language, gesture, bodily significations, desires. We can use Foucault's insightful
comments to illuminate this necessarily political relationship. They point towards an anti-anti-essentialism that
sees racialised subjectivity as the product of the social practices that supposedly derive
from it: "Rather than seeing the modem soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology,
one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the
body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary it exists, it has a reality, it is produced
permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of power that is exercised."64 These significations can be
condensed in the process of musical performance though it does not, of course,
monopolise them. In the black Atlantic context, they produce the imaginary effect of an
internal racial core or essence by acting on the body through the specific mechanisms
of identification and recognition that are produced in the intimate interaction of
performer and crowd. This reciprocal relationship can serve as an ideal communicative
situation even when the original makers of the music and its eventual consumers are
separated in space and time or divided by the technologies of sound reproduction and
the commodity form which their art has sought to resist. I have explored elsewhere how
the struggle against the commodity form has been taken over into the very
configurations that black mass cultural creation assumes. Negotiations with that status are revealed openly
and have become a cornerstone in the anti-aesthetic which governs those forms. The aridity of those three crucial terms-production,
circulation, and consumption-does scant justice to the convoluted outer national processes to which they now refer. Each of them,
in contrasting ways, hosts a politics of race and power which is hard to grasp, let alone fully appreciate,
through the sometimes crude categories that political economy and European cultural
criticism deploy in their tentative analyses of ethnicity and culture. The term "consumption"
has associations that are particularly problematic, and needs to be carefully unpacked. It accentuates the
passivity of its agents and plays down the value of their creativity as well as the micro-
political significance of their actions in understanding the forms of anti-discipline and
resistance conducted in everyday life. Michel de Certeau has made this point at a general level: Like law [one of its
models], culture articulates conflicts and alternately legitimizes, displaces or controls the
superior force. It develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often of violence, for which
it provides symbolic balances, contracts of compatibility and compromises, all more or
less temporary. The tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use
of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices."
AT: Off-case
T – Normative Political Advocacy
Political imagination is both inadequate and counter-productive – a constructivist
account of politicized identities presents a better strategy than instrumental
political calculus
Murray ‟05 Rolland D., Associate Professor of English at Brown University, author of Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black
Power, and Masculine Ideology (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). His current project considers the impact of postidentity politics on
contemporary African American culture. His essays have been published in such journals as the Yale Journal of Criticism,
Contemporary Literature, and Callaloo. He has been awarded fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as the
Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, available from Project MUSE,
Contemporary Literature, 46.1, pg. 72-73, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_literature/v046/46.1murray.html, ―Diaspora
by Bus: Reginald McKnight, Postmodernism, and Transatlantic Subjectivity‖ | ADM
McKnight's revision of détour and his rejection of the therapeutic remembrance of slavery are but extensions of his more substantial divergence from
an influential current within contemporary diaspora theory. Analyses by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Brent Edwards labor to rehabilitate the concept
of diaspora by repudiating its historical implication in narrow nationalism, essentialism, and political inefficacy. This rehabilitative inclination no
doubt guides Hall's efforts to distance his concept of contemporary diasporic identity from an ideology that privileges the singular "truth, the essence
of 'Caribbeanness,' of the black experience" (393). As an alternative, Hall valorizes a constructivist version of black Atlantic selfhood, one that thrives
by "the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives through, and not despite difference; by
hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference"
(402). His retooling of diaspora turns both on validating the constitutive social divisions within a black collective and a keen self-consciousness about
the provisional ways in which such identities are reproduced. Gilroy certainly draws inspiration from Hall on one level, but his project also explicitly
takes issue with Hall's brand of pluralist constructivism. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy imagines his own work as a third term in the opposition between
an "ontologically grounded essentialism" and "a pluralistic position which affirms blackness as an open signifier and seeks to celebrate complex
representations of a black particularity that is internally divided" by "class, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, economics, and political consciousness"
(32). Against this binary opposition he posits an Atlantic world culture that in one instantiation is bound by transnational forms of black expressive
culture. These insurgent cultural practices articulate a transformative "utopia" in which "[i]ts basic desire is to conjure up and enact the new modes of
friendship, happiness and solidarity that are consequent on the overcoming of the racial oppression on which modernity and its antinomy of rational
western progress as excessive barbarity relied" (38). The ineffable utopian expressions of black dance and song thus become the foundation upon
which [End Page 72] he imagines a diasporic culture more viable than that of the pluralists and essentialists.13 This disposition toward rehabilitation
appears no less vigorously in Edwards's deeply historicist project, The Practice of Diaspora. The book revisits the flowering of black internationalism in
the modernist era to recover the rich contacts between Francophone and U.S. writers. Fascinatingly, the study also brackets the
persistent ideological and political inadequacies of this political imaginary by attending
more rigorously to the historical construction of those relays. For instance, one of the project's key terms,
"décalage," refers to the necessary unevenness in the translation of ideas across linguistic,
political, cultural, and geographical divides. In one sense, décalage describes the rhetorical prostheses put into place to "fill some gap or rectify
some imbalance" in these transnational cultural exchanges (14). The prosthetic function indexes "precisely that which cannot be transferred or
exchanged, the refused biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water. It is the changing core of difference; it is the work of 'differences
within unity'" (14). The concept—nuanced and provocative as it is—also asks us to substitute interpretation of
how diasporic identities are transmitted and represented for an analytical assessment of
the political ends of diaspora. Put another way, a constructivist account of highly politicized
identities takes precedence over a more instrumental assessment of how political
claims fulfill their agendas. As Edwards argues, "Instead of reading for the efficacy of the
prosthesis, this orientation would look for the effects of such an operation" (14). By shifting the
grounds for assessment this way, the argument participates in the rehabilitative tendencies of its
predecessors.
The slave exists on a different ontological level—the precondition to communication,
fairness, and dialogue is to grant agency to the slave.
Brady, 12 [Nicholas, activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is an executive board member of Leaders of a Beautiful
Struggle, a community-based think tank focused on empowering youth in the political process. Through the organization, he has
helped to produce policy and critical intervention papers, organize efforts in Baltimore against the prison industrial complex, lead
educational forums on a myriad of community-oriented projects, and use debate as a critical pedagogical tool to activate the voices
of young people from ages 10 to 25. He is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor‘s degree in Philosophy and
is currently a doctoral student in the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory program. ―Louder Than the Dark: Toward
an Acoustics of Suffering‖ //JW]
―Fuckin pig get shot
300 men will search for me
My brother get popped
And don‘t no one hear the sound
Don‘t no one hear the rounds, ooh, sound
Don‘t no one hear the shells, ooh, shells
Don‘t no one hear a sound‖
-Frank Ocean ―Crack Rock‖
Can you hear a shadow?
The more enlightened, the deeper the shadows, but can the shadow enunciate the depth
of its sorrow back to the world it is invariably bound to? A silhouette is wheeled to the
corner of a hallway, its face obscured. The nurse has demanded that she leave the hospital. Unbeknownst
to the shadow, the police happen to be in the building at the same time and are asked to
remove her from the premises. They drag her out of the wheelchair and handcuff her,
leaving her slouched on the ground. A few more cops come and they cart her away to
literally rot in a jail cell. The shadow‘s name is Anna Brown. She has also been named ―the
homeless lady,‖ as well as ―the crackhead‖ or ―drug sick‖ individual by the officers
that arrested her. She went to the hospital after spraining her ankle, was arrested
because she refused to leave due to continued pain, and was found dead on the prison
floor because her sprain produced blood clots that lodged into her lungs. Due to medical
malpractice and the police officers‘ violence, Anna passed away alone on the floor of a prison cell. Yet, that last sentence
was entirely too nice, for in truth Anna Brown was murdered. The hesitation to describe this as a
―murder‖ is because that implies an event, a narrative, a ―when,‖ ―where,‖ and ―who‖ (as in ―who done it?‖). Yet this was not
an event with an acting subject; she was instead murdered by subjectivity itself: a series
of incidents centered on her body, each reverberating off each other into an orchestra of
death. Each proceeding was an echo of the one preceding it: waves of suffering
reflecting off each action through time. Her death was caused by the incoherence of her voice, her calls for
care, her screams of agony. Put another way, she was murdered by civil society‘s inability-–and lack of
desire-–to hear her being. Discourse on race normally focuses on the material and the
visual, but the video of Anna Brown‘s death points us less to the images and more to
the centrality of aurality to black suffering. The first part of the video is without audio, but this does not
mean sound is absent per se. That the video lacks audio in the beginning says more than perhaps
the soundtrack itself could, for it makes explicit the inaudibility of black suffering. We
know that Anna Brown had expressed her lasting pain, in spite of the doctor‘s opinion
that she was fine. The hospital then ordered her to leave and she protested, saying that
she was still in pain. She was forcibly wheeled to the hallway and eventually arrested by the police. Her vocal protests,
critiques of inadequate service and expression of her persistent pain, fell on deaf ears. She spoke the knowledge of
her body, but her voice was muted and over-dubbed by the knowledge of the
professionals. How can the black know about itself? How can the shadow speak back?
The violence that produces the subject (in this case, the doctor) robs Anna Brown of vocality,
not so much literally as ontologically. Insofar as an object (a commodity, a slave) can
speak, it cannot be said that it can communicate. At the etymological root of
―communicate‖ is the logic of the commons or community: informing to participate in
the world, sharing one‘s utterance(s) to join the community. Communication, not even
to imply anything as serious as the ethics of dialogue, requires an equal ontological
status amongst the communicators. That several titles of the video online have called
her the ―homeless woman‖ evidences one singular truth (the desire to insult her
notwithstanding): Anna Brown, as the descendent of slaves, has no home while the doctors
are in their own dominion. In a public lecture titled ―People-of-Color-Blindness,‖ Jared Sexton describes an
experience at a jazz club where the microphones go off, but the band continues to play.
Even though the sociality between the band and the audience has been shut down, the
band still plays on. Sexton uses this example to dramatize how even though the black is
socially dead, that does not signify that black life is non-existent. Instead, our social
death signifies that black life is sealed off from the world and happens elsewhere:
―underground or in outer space.‖ In this way Anna speaks, but the microphone that
would project her subjectivity to the world has been turned off. Her suffering has been
rendered unreal while her voice is heard as incoherent and dangerous. If Anna Brown‘s
suffering is inaudible, the second half of the video speaks to how her voice and pain are criminalized. When the police
arrive, they surround Anna and then drag her out of the wheelchair, handcuff her, and leave her on the hospital floor. She is
given two different charges: her protests for better service are charged as ―trespassing‖
and her inability to walk due to her injury is charged as ―resisting arrest.‖ When she is in the
police car, the camera in the vehicle has a microphone. When they arrive at the prison, Anna continues to
tell them she can‘t walk and that she needs to be in a hospital. The police officers ignore
her statements and instead oscillate between asking her ―are you going to get out‖ and
threatening her; ―you have two seconds to [swing your legs out]…‖ Each implies that
she can move her legs and she is choosing not to. As Saidiya Hartman writes in Scenes of
Subjection, ―the slave was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed intent and
rationality solely in the context of criminal liability.‖ Her suffering remains inaudible,
but her voice can only be heard by the police as challenging the law, resisting arrest,
disrespecting their authority; her voice can only be heard as a legitimizing force for
their violence. As they drag her out of the car, she screams out in pain before the door is
shut and her voice becomes muffled. They carried Anna Brown to the cell and laid her
body on the ground as if she were already a corpse; they even refused her the dignity
of lying on the bed. As they stepped around her body and closed the cell door, the only
sign she was still alive were her wordless screams. Her screams pierce through my speakers, haunting my
mind but they seem to have no effect on the prison workers. She was clearly not the first screaming body
they had carried into a cell, for they did not even take time to stop their chatter. There is no passion, intimacy, or
perverse enjoyment, just a multicultural group of men doing their job. Anna‘s death is
not the ―primal scene‖ that the beating of Aunt Hester (Frederick Douglass‘s Aunt) was. These two
black women‘s screams are connected by the paradigm of anti-blackness, yet their
screams terrify for different reasons. The beating of Aunt Hester is a spectacular example
of the ―blood-stained gate‖ of the slave‘s subjection. While the circulation of the Anna
Brown video has given me pause, her death is more an example of the “mundane and
quotidian” terror that Hartman focuses on in her text. Brown‘s death was a (non)event, concealed from
the world by the walls of the prison cell. Without this video, only those on the inside would have
heard her screams. Anna Brown didn‘t simply pass away, she was killed, but who did
it? Douglass‘s Aunt Hester was beaten by Captain Anthony, a man who wanted her and was jealous of her relationship to another
slave. Anna Brown was murdered by a disparate set of (non)events where her body shuttled
between a hospital and a prison, doctors and nurses, police officers and prison officials.
There is no one person who killed her; instead, a structure of violence murdered her.
No intimacy, just cold efficiency. Her scream was less of a sorrow song than the sharp
pitch of nu-bluez: an impossible scream to be heard from the depths of incarceration
and incapacity. Anna Brown‘s death was neither an event nor a spectacle. An event
signifies presence, but Anna‘s death is an ethereal absence, a spirit‟s wail fading away
like one‟s warm breath on a cold day. If the beating of Aunt Hester demands that one
meditate on the spectacle of black suffering, Anna Brown‘s screams call for us to think of
the aurality of agony, the acoustics of suffering. What are the aural mechanisms that
made it impossible for civil society to hear Anna Brown‘s pain? What are the
technologies that remix the tonalities of black people into criminalized speech? These
thoughts on the acoustics of suffering are not to displace the visual for the aural, but
instead to theorize how they form and invigorate each other. Put another way, anti-blackness
is a structure where (black) skin speaks for itself and the body it encompasses, even
when the black‘s subjecthood is muted. In the darkness of space, one cannot hear you scream. Focusing on
acoustics can offer a different sharpening of the cutting edge, a modality that allows us
to tune into the unimaginable frequency of black thought. If it is impossible to hear
the black (aurality) and for the black to speak on its own terms (orality), then to be heard in
this world, we would have to break the laws of physics–ontologically speaking. This is
another way of saying that the acoustics of suffering forces us to think of the impossibilities of
harmony and, perhaps, the terrifying beauty of cacophony. In this way, the
enlightenment of the ignorant shadows would not be the key to the future, but instead
the reverberation of our revolutionary racket that clangs through civil society. From the
black hole of our subjectivity and into the screeching noise of this parasitic world, we
scream that our lives, black life, matters until the final, paradigmatic quiet comes.2
Their attempt to make debate a space for dialogical communication effaces the
multiplicity of cultures within debate—our radical dissent is a form of reinscribing
the terms of communication which is a precondition to true deliberative democracy
Livingston 12 [Alexander, ―Avoiding Deliberative Democracy? Micropolitics, Manipulation, and the Public Sphere‖,
Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2012), pp. 269-294 // JW]
It is important here to stress what a critical theory of deliberative democracy is not.16 It is not the
gentlemanly sport of cool, calm, and dispassionate exchange of impartial reasons. It
does not depend on the knockdown force of the better argument in a single-round,
one-on-one, face-to-face bout of verbal jousting. It is not the reduction of political
debate to a matter of logical demonstration. And it is not a clinical exer- cise wherein
citizens are extracted from their concrete political world and placed in an artificially
domination-free space of the ideal speech situation or deliberative focus group. All of these
proposals, not to mention others, have been put forward in one form or another under the banner of deliberative democracy.17 If
theories of deliberative democracy were limited to these options, Connolly would be right to charge
them with an intellectualism that ignores the vagaries of lived political praxis. However, a
critical theory of deliberative democracy provides both an alternative to this deliberative intellectualism as well as to Connolly‘s
democratic deficit. The key to this alternative approach to democracy overlooked by both Connolly and these intellectualist theories
of deliberation is the complex institution of the public sphere. The public sphere is the decentered network of voluntary
associations and media channels that crisscross civil society. It has no center or hub it radiates out of. Rather it is a rhizome in
Deleuze and Guattari‘s sense of the term: a multiplicity of lively points and intersections that hang
together that lacks organization and is not subject to central control. Philippe Mengue makes just
this point about the nature of the public sphere when he criticizes Deleuze and Guattari‘s antipathy toward the idea of politics as
the expression and contestation of public reasons. The public sphere, as he rightly notes, is precisely the kind of
deterritorialized plane where movement and becoming can occur.18 Deliberative
democracy is a model of democracy that explains how ideas circulate in such a public
sphere; that is, how they bump into other ideas, transform them, and become
transformed themselves in turn. Key to a critical theory of deliberative democracy is the
claim that the exchange of reasons within this rhizomatic public sphere is what Jürgen Habermas calls
―subjectless‖ (1996, 299). A public sphere is always more than the prudential exchange of
reasons between two parties, but it is also always less than a self-reflection of a
macrosubject capable of action. Rather, it is a complex mediating institution that allows
ideas and reasons to become public—that is, it circulates and distributes reasons and
ideas beyond the bounds of local conversations, turning them into resources to be drawn on, tested, and
sometimes rejected in more local exercises of reason giving. Crucially, the reasons that do all this circulating in
the public sphere must be understood in an expansive sense. At the level of democratic the- ory, no
one form of discourse has a monopoly on what counts as a reason. Deliberative
democracy recognizes diverse forms of communication as reason giving, including
storytelling, rhetoric, and greeting. Each has a place in a deliberative politics insofar as
it is capable of drawing a connection between a particular claim or experience and a
more general and acces- sible norm (Young 2000, 52–80; Dryzek 2000, 57–80). A public reason is always a reason
for doing or avoiding doing something. First-person stories like those W. E. B. Du Bois tells in The Souls of Black Folk are
vivid depic- tions of the experience of racial oppression, but they function as reasons to
a nonblack audience insofar as they aim to open the eyes of white America to the
complacency of its commitments to liberty and equality. A public sphere is a site where these
sorts of reasons are articulated and take on broader and richer meanings, as they are
received by an indefinite audience of strangers.19 The informal and diffuse network of information that
spans from labor meetings to church groups to book clubs to blogs to newspapers to PTA meetings and to dissident groups carries
our reasons across multiple testing sites where they are subject to uptake, rejection, or transformation, only to be recirculated again.
This public exchange of reasons has the important epistemic function of improving the
quality of the reasons we use to justify our interests and decisions, but the more crucial
function is its critical one. The articulation and contestation of reasons in the public
sphere is a motor for self-reflection. It is this function, the self-critical and self-reflection
function of exposure to diverse and impersonal reasons in a public sphere, that deliberative
democracy values. While the media-saturated public sphere trades in low-involvement advertising and affective
manipulation, it also and more importantly can be a means of provoking us to reflect on our received identities and interests.20
These epistemic and critical functions of the public sphere come together to provide a
democratic resource for inciting self and collective transformation in novel and
potentially emancipatory ways. Seen as a molecular interplay of constantly flowing, shifting, and transforming
reasons and self-understandings that provokes new and creative (but reflective) becomings that help us cope with the challenges of
political community, the circulation of ordinary talk in the public sphere is Deleuzian. The public sphere is an example of
micropolitics par excellence. Once we introduce this institution of the public sphere into the discus- sion, we avail ourselves of a
democratic alternative to Connolly‘s politics of ―cultural-corporeal infusion.‖ The task of generating resonance for
a leftist politics can be divorced from the idea of manipulating visceral responses in
favor of a politics that experiments with how reasons resonate in the public sphere, that is,
with how they might function to provoke self-reflection. Reasons resonate when they make some claim on
the moral and concep- tual imaginary of their audience. That is to say, their resonance is not
a feature of their logical structure but rather of the receptivity of the audience to them. A
reason resonates when its audience considers it what William James called a ―live‖ hypothesis, ―one which appeals as a real
possibility to him to whom it is proposed‖ (1967, 717). Making reasons resonate, however, is the task of
activists and social movements who introduce new concerns to the public sphere and
redescribe acceptable existing practices as oppressive and harmful. To this end, an
egalitarian and inclusive public sphere requires the insurgent work of its voluntary
associations in the form of ―deliberative enclaves‖ (Mansbridge 1999) or ―counterpublics‖ (Fraser 1992)
where dissidents, interests groups, social movements, and the oppressed experiment
with novel discourses and redescriptions of the status quo to introduce into the public
sphere‘s circu- lation. When these experiments in consciousness-raising are successful, as
with the feminist movement‘s introduction of ―date rape,‖ the queer move- ment‘s turn away from civil unions in favor or ―gay
marriage‖ and Stephen Colbert‘s introduction of ―truthiness‖ into the American political lexicon, the terms of resonance
in the public sphere change. Coining terms like ―gay marriage‖ is not the same thing as institutionalizing it, but it does
have the effect of redefining the terms of public debate around a now resonant expe- rience of exclusion that had hitherto been
simply invisible or erroneously seen as harmless. To put this in the language of Deleuze, deliberative redescription
can function as a war machine. The experimenting with resonating reasons in a public
on the part of activists is an exercise in ―plugging in‖ a resonance machine into the
public sphere. The transformative power of the resonance machine, understood as an inventive
redescription of our received practices, has the power to transform the way citizens see
their shared world, their own interests, and the suffering of others. The work of
counterpublics is to ―smooth‖ the striated space of public political culture so as to
displace old prejudices and allow new identities and claims to flourish.

T – Must be USFG
We’ll critique the negative’s entire conception of America, which is rooted in
conquest, colonial power, and modern nation-building – limiting discussion to the
nationalist framework of the United States represents a parochial approach that is
critiqued by the entire 1AC
Muthyala ‟01 John, visiting assistant professor of English at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa. He is currently at work on a
book-length manuscript on the literatures of the Americas, available from Project MUSE, Cultural Critique, 47, pg. 107-108,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v047/47.1muthyala.html, ―Reworlding America: The Globalization of American
Studies‖ | ADM
O'Gorman rejects the substantialistic concept of America as a thing-in-itself waiting to be discovered and whose discovery would automatically
unravel the meaning of America. Rather than being a ready-made thing already there, existing in time and space, discourse and belief, O'Gorman
argues that America was "produced" in the intersection of Old World cosmographic theories,
European political intrigues, religious injunctions and worldviews, and personal
idiosyncrasies and dispositions, all of which gave rise to the meaning of America over a
period of time. Coterminous with this production of America, an incipient humanism that stressed the limitless
potential of man to shape his own cosmic destiny began to gain credence. 6 It is in this context that, according to
O'Gorman, America "developed from a complex, living process of exploration and interpretation" (124), and its "history will no longer be that which
has happened to America, but that which it has been, is, and is in the act of being" (46). Common to O'Gorman and Richard is the analeptic extension
of modernity and the idea of a break or rupture from the past, but while Richard privileges the perspective of the Native Indians and the African
slaves, O'Gorman recasts modernity as the undermining of medieval beliefs beginning with the finding, not the discovery, of a landmass west of
Europe. To O'Gorman, it is the very production of America as a narrative strategy that marks the
process of modernization or, rather, the entry point of modernity in the Americas. If we begin with
Richard's and O'Gorman's premise, modernity begins with the era of New World conquest and settlement, the consolidation of
colonial power, and later, in the eighteenth century, at least as far as Europe is concerned, coalesces with the project of the
Enlightenment, [End Page 107] the founding of nations, the establishing of juridical institutions,
the development of the army, and the building of roads, bridges, railroads, trains,
telephones, hospitals, etc. It is in this context that we can productively extend Gilroy's
notion of the black Atlantic and Glissant's idea of overlapping modernities, and it is to these issues that I now turn. Arguing that
studying writers likes Du Bois, Martin Delaney, Phyllis Wheatley, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright, among others, within the
nationalist framework of the United States would be parochial, since such a nationalist
focus would neglect to address the implications of travel and displacement that all the
writers experienced, Gilroy proposes the black Atlantic "as a single, complex, unit of analysis . . . to produce an explicitly transnational
and intercultural perspective" to study the "deterritorialized, multiplex and anti-national basis for the affinity of the identity of passions between
divers black populations" (15). It is within the nexus of the black Atlantic, argues Gilroy, that we see the emergence of a "counter culture of
modernity." He uses the image of the ship as a metaphor to conceptualize the intercontinental
engagement of cultures and economies. The ship as perpetually moving, as emblematic of the
"shifting spaces" and "half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialization and modernization" (16-17), and
as shaping the Atlantic as a "system of cultural exchanges" (14) dramatizes the dispersal of migrant cultures, a
dispersal that redraws the margins of the nation by contesting the absolutism of ethnic
identity and the provincialism of nationalism.

Defense of the US federal government makes citizens partners to the Constitution’s
crime of providing the bloody links in the chain of slavery
Rugemer ‟12 Edward B., assistant professor of history and African American studies at Yale University. He is the author of
The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War, available from Project MUSE, The Journal of the Civil War
Era, 2.2, pg. 190-91, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_civil_war_era/v002/2.2.rugemer.html, ―Slave Rebels and
Abolitionists: The Black Atlantic and the Coming of the Civil War‖ | ADM
Douglass's opening lines mocked the rhetoric of the Fourth of July. It was not the occasion for "partial patriotism" or a day for
the "blood-stained warrior." It was "the Tenth Anniversary of West India Emancipation—a day, a deed, an event, all glorious in the annals of
Philanthropy." It was "the peaceful emancipation." But Douglass had a more radical message. He spoke of Nat
Turner, who eighteen years before had invoked the name of "a God of justice" and led a rebellion against his oppressors. He reminded
his audience that Turner had been shot down "amid showers of American [End Page 190]
bullets" guided by a Constitution that guaranteed the slaveholder the powers of the
federal government to suppress rebellion. Douglass charged his white listeners, "the voters of this
city," with "the awful responsibility of enslaving and imbruting my brothers and sisters
in the Southern States." The Constitution provided the "bloody links in the chain of slavery," and
their loyalty to its authority made them partners to its crime. Douglass's challenge to
the white voters of his audience to recognize their culpability in American slavery
revealed his political agenda. Slavery would not be abolished until a majority was willing to condemn it, and to act—to vote—
based on that condemnation.31
Modernity DA – The aff is a critique of political engagement – the negative’s reliance
on instrumental bureaucratic rationality stunts the creation of a new social order
and reinforces traditional structures of modernity and rationality
Pettinger ‟93 Alasdair, studied at the Universities of Birmingham and Essex, completing his PhD in Literature in 1988 while
working as a civil servant in London. Since 1992, he has been based in Glasgow, working at the Scottish Music Centre and pursuing
his academic interests as an independent scholar. He has held visiting research fellowships at the University of Central Lancashire
(2000) and Nottingham Trent University (2004-2007) and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Cultures,
Languages and Area Studies at the University of Liverpool (2010-2013). He is the editor of Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black
Atlantic (1998), and has published a number of essays reflecting his (overlapping) interests in travel literature, the cultures of
slavery and abolitionism, and representations of Haiti. His current projects include a study of Frederick Douglass' visit to Scotland
in the 1840s and a history of the word voodoo in English, available from JSTOR, Research in African Literatures, 29.4, pg. 145-46,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820848, ―Enduring Fortresses: A Review of ‗The Black Atlantic‘‖ | ADM
A second argument he makes in his attempt to define the "black Atlantic" – spelled out in some detail – centers on the
claim that it is what he calls a "counterculture of modernity." This counterculture is not a
conventional political movement, aimed at reform. That would mean that it would be geared
to changing the policies of national governments, and trapped entirely within what he sees as
the straitjacket of post- Enlightenment instrumental bureaucratic "rationality." The
"black Atlantic," by contrast, is more of a cultural formation, which sets its sights on an entirely
new social order, a world to come, typically formulated in escha- tological and apocalyptic tones.
He insists that this formation is not located in a pure space "outside" the West, but rather inside
and outside it. This might be a way of avoiding a rather crude binary opposition (which would place it in the Afrocentric
camp), but, as I have tried to show elsewhere (see my "Ships"), it does rely on a willingness to accept general
terms such as "modernity" and "rationality" as if they were self-evidently useful. But my main point is this :
if the "memory" argument tends to lead to an exclusion of Afrocentric texts and their worship of the "premodern," the
"counterculture" argument shows a certain impatience with the Eurocentrics, and their
uncritical espousal of the "modern." Keith Richburg could of course be emblematic here, ending his article as he
does, sitting in front of his computer screen, in a house surrounded by my own high fence, protected by two large dogs, a paid
security guard, a silent alarm system and a large metal door that I bolt shut at night to keep "Africa" from coming across the yard
and bashing in my brains with a panga knife for the $200 in my desk drawer. (33) Now, I'm sure that Gilroy would find in this
scenario a perfect embodiment of "modernity." The article would thus hardly qualify as a black cultural expression eligible for
membership of the "black Atlantic," in the sense in which I have just been elucidating, which demands a rather
more skeptical – even transcendental – perspective. There are all kinds of reasons one might not want to pay
a nocturnal visit to the author of such an account, but I suspect they are somewhat more prosaic than his relationship to post-
enlightenment Western thought.
These “emancipatory claims” inherent to liberal modernity foster racism and
nationalism, the greatest evils of our time
Gikandi ‟02 Simon, Currently Robert Hayden Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, he is the recipient of awards from organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon
Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His most recent books include Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of
Colonialism and Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Available from Project MUSE, American Literary History, 14.3, pg. 596-97,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v014/14.3gikandi.html, ―Race and Cosmopolitanism‖ | ADM
Still, in spite of the particular focus on British debates, Against Race is unique in Gilroy's oeuvre in one key respect—it seeks to
assert forms of identity outside the confines of Englishness. Here, Gilroy wants to explore the possibility that a
mode of national belonging, even one that included blackness and other forms of minority identity,
might, after all, be a poison pill. Thus, while Gilroy's early works were obsessed with the double consciousness of
national belonging, the problem of being black and British, Against Race has ostensibly left Britishness behind and sought refuge in
the intranational space of the European community. Whether this move from the national to the intranational resolves the persistent
problem of race and its relation to the nation is a question I will keep on returning to in this essay. What I want to stress here is that
while Gilroy's project may no longer be driven by anxieties about what it means to be
black and British (the idea of Europe has made Englishness just another ancillary identity on the march toward the global),
the fate of black mentalities in the emerging European polity demand attention because the
intranational seems to raise a different set of issues, or to represent old ones, in a different cloak. Simply
put, while an emerging regional and pan-national European identity might seem to have resolved Gilroy's earlier concerns about
modes of belonging rooted in such troublesome categories as race and nation, the turn to Europe seems to make the older problems
taken up in There Ain't No [End Page 596] Black in the Union Jack and The Black Atlantic even more complex. Race and racism
always seem more complicated when their geography is expanded. And there is no greater complication here than Gilroy's attempt
to produce a genealogy of race—and the crisis of raciology—in relation to the culture of European modernity. Can the
disease of racism be isolated from the emancipatory claims of modernity? If Gilroy is
haunted by the above question, it is perhaps because more than any other scholar of blackness in the modern world he is
acutely aware of the fatal linkage between race, nation, and cosmopolitanism in the
genesis of modernity. In fact, he opens his book by highlighting the frustrations that emerge when we realize that the
moment that has given us immutable liberal values such as freedom and democracy also
contains the seeds of most of the great evils of our time. In an important respect, then, it could be said
that the first goal of Gilroy's book is to secure the values of modernity by quarantining
them from the crisis of raciology. The second goal is to probe the perennial question of what I will call the blemish
of modernity—where and how did the narrative of emancipation go wrong and why are the ideals of a
modern identity almost always at odds with its practices? From an analytical perspective, Gilroy's first goal—addressing the
"continuing tensions associated with the constitution of politics in racialized form" (1)—is straightforward, and each of the chapters
in this book presents us with many examples of how race came to be embedded in what should have been larger forms of identity
such as humanism, modernity, and culture.

AT: Fairness
Their calls for fairness and limits uphold the existing power structures criticized by
the aff.
Delgado, 92 [Richard, Law Prof at U. of Colorado, ―Shadowboxing: An Essay On Power,‖ In Cornell Law Review, May //JW]
We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of conduct into the very
term fair . 41 Thus, the stronger party is able to have his way and see himself as principled
at the same time. 42 Imagine, for example, a man's likely reaction to the suggestion that
subjective considerations -- a woman's mood, her sense of pressure or intimidation,
how she felt about the man, her unexpressed fear of reprisals if she did not go ahead 43 --
ought to play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape. Most men find
this suggestion offensive; it requires them to do something they are not accustomed to
doing. "Why," they say, "I'd have to be a mind reader before I could have sex with anybody?" 44 "Who knows, anyway, what
internal inhibitions the woman might have been harboring?" And "what if the woman simply changed her mind later and charged
me with rape?" 45 What we never notice is that women can "read" men's minds perfectly well.
The male perspective is right out there in the world, plain as day, inscribed in culture,
song, and myth -- in all the prevailing narratives. 46 These narratives tell us that men want
and are entitled [*820] to sex, that it is a prime function of women to give it to them, 47 and
that unless something unusual happens, the act of sex is ordinary and blameless. 48 We
believe these things because that is the way we have constructed women, men, and
"normal" sexual intercourse. 49 Notice what the objective standard renders irrelevant: a
downcast look; 50 ambivalence; 51 the question, "Do you really think we should?"; slowness
in following the man's lead ; 52 a reputation for sexual selectivity; 53 virginity; youth; and
innocence. 54 Indeed, only a loud firm "no" counts, and probably only if it is repeated several times, overheard
by others, and accompanied by forceful body language such as pushing the man and walking away briskly. 55 Yet society
and law accept only this latter message (or something like it), and not the former, more
nuanced ones, to mean refusal. Why? The "objective" approach is not inherently better
or more fair. Rather, it is accepted because it embodies the sense of the stronger party,
who centuries ago found himself in a position to dictate what permission meant. 56
Allowing ourselves to be drawn into reflexive, predictable arguments about
administrability, fairness, stability, and ease of determination points us away from what
[*821] really counts: the way in which stronger parties have managed to inscribe their
views and interests into "external" culture, so that we are now enamored with that
way of judging action. 57 First, we read our values and preferences into the culture; 58 then
we pretend to consult that culture meekly and humbly in order to judge our own acts. 59
A nice trick if you can get away with it.
Their topicality argument isn’t neutral—rather it heavily favors the established
order
Meszaros, 89 [Istvan, likes Marx not Adam Smith. The Power of Ideology //JW]
Nowhere is the myth of ideological neutrality – the self-proclaimed Wertfreiheit or value neutrality of so-called ‗rigorous social
science‘ – stronger than in the field of methodology. Indeed, we are often presented with the claim that the
adoption of the advocated methodological framework would automatically exempt one
from all controversy about values, since they are adequate method itself, thereby saving
one from unnecessary complications and securing the desired objectivity and
uncontestable outcome. Claims and procedures of this kind are, of course, extremely
problematical. For they circularly assume that their enthusiasm for the virtues of
‗methodological neutrality‘ is bound to yield ‗value neutral‘ solutions with regard to
highly contested issues, without first examining the all-important question as to the
conditions of possibility – or otherwise – of the postulated systematic neutrality at the
plans of methodology itself. The unchallengeable validity of the recommended
procedure is supposed to be self-evident on account of its purely methodological
character. In reality, of course, this approach to methodology is heavily loaded with a
conservative ideological substance. Since, however, the plane of methodology (and ‗meta-theory‘) is said to be in
principle separated from that of the substantive issues, the methodological circle can be conveniently closed. Whereupon the mere
insistence on the purely methodological character of the criteria laid down is supposed to establish the claim according to which the
approach in question is neutral because everybody can adopt it as the common frame of reference of ‗rational discourse‘. Yet,
curiously enough, the proposed methodological tenets are so defined that vast areas of vital social concern are a priori excluded
from their rational discourse ‗metaphysical‘, ‗ideological‘, etc. The effect of circumscribing in this way the
scope of the one and only admissible approach is that it automatically disqualifies in the
name of methodology itself, all those who do not fit into the stipulated framework of
discourse. As a result, the propounders of the ‗right method‘ are spared the difficulties
that go with acknowledging the real divisions and incompatibilities as they necessarily
arise from the contending social interests at the roots of alternative approaches and the
rival sets of values associated with them. This is where we can see more clearly the
social orientation implicit in the whole procedure. For – far from offering an adequate
scope for critical enquiry – the advocated general adoption of the allegedly neutral
methodological framework is equivalent, in fact, to consenting not even to raise the
issues that really matter. Instead, the stipulated ‗common‘ methodological procedure succeeds in transforming the
enterprise of ‗rational discourse‘ into the dubious practice of producing methodology for the sake of methodology: a tendency more
pronounced in the twentieth century than ever before. This practice consists in sharpening the recommended methodological knife
until nothing but the bare handle is left, at which point the new knife is adopted for the same purpose. For the ideal methodological
knife is not meant for cutting, only for sharpening, thereby interposing itself between the critical intent and the real objects of
criticism which it can obliterate for as long as the pseudo-critical activity of knife-sharpening for tits own sake continues to be
pursued. And that happens to be precisely its inherent ideological purpose. Naturally, to speak of a ‗common‘
methodological framework in which one can resolve the problems of a society torn by
irreconcilable social interests and pursuing antagonistic confrontations is delusory, at
best, notwithstanding all talk about ‗ideal communication communities‘. But to define
the methodological tenets of all rational discourse by way of transubstantiating into
‗ideal types‘ (or by putting into methodological ‗brackets‘) the discussion of contending
social values reveals the ideological colour as well as the extreme fallaciousness of the
claimed rationality. For such treatment of the major areas of conflict, under a great
variety of forms – from the Viennese version of ‗logical positivism‘ to Wittgenstein‘s
famous ladder that must be ‗thrown away‘ at the point of confronting the question of
values, and from the advocacy of the Popperian principle of ‗little by little‘ in the
‗emotivist‘ theory of value – inevitably always favours the established order. And it
does so by declaring the fundamental structural parameters of the given society ‗out of
bounds‘ to the potential contestants, in the authority of the ideally ‗common‘
methodology. However, even on a cursory inspection of the issues at stake it out to be fairly obvious that to consent not to
question the fundamental structural framework of the established order is radically different according to whether one does so as
the beneficiary of the order or from the standpoint of those who find themselves at the receiving end, exploited and oppressed by
the overall determinations (and not just by some limited and more or less easily corrigible detail) of that order. Consequently, to
establish the ‗common‘ identity of the two, opposed sides of a structurally safeguarded
hierarchical order – by means of the reduction of the people belong to the contending
social forces into fictitious ‗rational interlocutors‘, extracted from their divided real
world and transplanted into a beneficially shared universe of ideal discourse – would
be nothing sort of methodological miracle. Contrary to the wishful thinking
hypostatized as a timeless and socially unspecified rational community, the elementary
condition of a truly rational discourse would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of
contesting the given order of society in substantive terms. This would imply the
articulation of the relevant problems not on the plane of self-referential articulation of
the relevant problems not on the plane of self-referential theory and methodology, but
as inherently practical issues whose conditions of solution point towards the necessity
of radical structural changes. In other words, it would require the explicit rejection of all
fiction of methodological and meta-theoretical neutrality. But, of course, this would be far too much
to expect precisely because the society in which we live is a deeply divided society. This is why through the dichotomies of ‗fact and
value‘, ‗theory and practice‘, ‗formal and substantive rationality‘, etc. The conflict-transcending methodological
miracle is constantly stipulated as the necessary regulative framework of the ruling
ideology. What makes this approach particularly difficult to challenge is that its value-commitments are mediated by
methodological precepts to such a degree that it is virtually impossible to bring them into the focus of discussion without openly
contesting the framework as a whole. For the conservative sets of values at the roots of such orientation remain several steps
removed from the ostensible subject of dispute as defined in logico/methodological, formal/structural, and semantic/analytical
terms. And who would suspect of ideological bias the impeccable – methodologically sanctioned – credentials of ‗procedural rules‘,
‗models and ‗paradigms‘? Once, though, such rules and paradigms are adopted as the common
frame of reference of what may or may not be allowed to considered the legitimate
subject of debate, everything that enters into the accepted parameters is necessarily
constrained not only by the scope of the overall framework, but simultaneously also by
the inexplicit ideological assumptions upon the basis of which the methodological
principles themselves were in the first place constitution. This why the allegedly ‗non-ideological‘
ideologies which so successfully conceal and exercise their apologetic function in the guise of neutral methodology are doubly
mystifying.

T – “Ocean Exploration”
Exploration means to investigate, study, or analyze
Merriam-Webster, 11 [2011, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exploring//JW]
a : to investigate, study, or analyze : look into <explore the relationship between social class and learning
ability> —sometimes used with indirect questions <to explore where ethical issues arise — R.
T. Blackburn> b : to become familiar with by testing or experimenting <explore new cuisines>
Ocean refers to any unstable, fluid body – that includes the confluence of race,
nationality, sexuality, and gender embodied by the diasporic communities of the
black Atlantic (as well as traditional resource extraction affirmatives)
Tinsley ‟08 Omise'eke Natasha, assistant professor in the departments of English and African American studies at the
University of Minnesota. Her forthcoming book, Thiefing Sugar: Reading Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Duke
University Press), excavates and explores Dutch-, English-, and French-language Caribbean women's texts between 1900 and 1990,
tracing how their queering of landscape-as-female-beloved metaphors imagines a poetics and erotics of decolonization, available
from Project MUSE, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14.2-3, pg. 191-92,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.html, ―Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic:
Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage‖ | ADM
And water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race, nationality,
sexuality, and gender I want to imagine here. This wateriness is metaphor, and history too. The brown-
skinned, fluid-bodied experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in
intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean.
You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy never told us is how queer relationships were forged on merchant
and pirate ships, where Europeans [End Page 191] and Africans slept with fellow—and I mean same-sex—sailors. And, more powerfully and silently,
how queer relationships emerged in the holds of slave ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this
black Atlantic when I was studying relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word
Creole women use for their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is "my girl," but literally it means mate, as in shipmate—she who survived the Middle
Passage with me. Sedimented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles, oral tradition, and
anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the sex-segregated holds, and captive African men
created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-
occupants on these ships.¶ I evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the black queer Atlantic. The ocean
obscures all origins, and neither ship nor Atlantic can be a place of origin. Not of blackness,
though perhaps Africans first became negros and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though perhaps some Africans were first
intimate with same-sex shipmates then. Instead, in relationship to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic
is the site of what the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls "crosscurrents."¶ Oceans and seas are important
sites for differently situated people. Indignous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists, workers, and athletes.
Oceans and seas are sites of inequality and exploitation—resource extraction, pollution,
militarization, atomic testing, and genocide. At the same time, oceans and seas are sites of
beauty and pleasure—solitude, sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and maritime
realms are also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous
trajectories of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual formations.1
Oceans aren’t merely abstract figures, but politico-cultural units that inevitably refer
back to the Middle Passage and the slave trade – our aff is core aff ground
Tinsley ‟08 Omise'eke Natasha, assistant professor in the departments of English and African American studies at the
University of Minnesota. Her forthcoming book, Thiefing Sugar: Reading Desire Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Duke
University Press), excavates and explores Dutch-, English-, and French-language Caribbean women's texts between 1900 and 1990,
tracing how their queering of landscape-as-female-beloved metaphors imagines a poetics and erotics of decolonization, available
from Project MUSE, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 14.2-3, pg. 194-95,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v014/14.2-3.tinsley.html, ―Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic:
Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage‖ | ADM
In the past fifteen years postcolonial studies effected sea changes in scholarly images of the global south, smashing and wearing
away essentialist conceptions of race and nationality with the insistent pounding force of ocean waters. Rigorously theorizing
identities that have always already been in flux and rethinking black "insularity" from England and Manhattan to Martinique and
Cuba, imaginative [End Page 194] captains of Atlantic and Caribbean studies have called
prominently on oceanic metaphors. Their conceptual geographies figure oceans and seas as
a presence that is history, a history that is present. In the watershed The Black Atlantic, Gilroy
evokes the Atlantic as the trope through which he imagines the emergence of black
modernities. A past of Atlantic crossings underpins his engagement with contemporary
multiracial Britain, where the black in the Union Jack is no novelty introduced by recent immigrants but a continuation of
centuries of transoceanic interchanges. Calling on the ship as the first image of this black Atlantic, Gilroy begins by stipulating that
ships and oceans are not merely abstract figures but "cultural and political units" that
"refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-remembered micro politics of the
slave trade."8 He underscores that seminal African diaspora figures like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Robert
Wedderburn, and Crispus Attucks worked with and as sailors (why omit Harriet Jacobs, Mary Seacole, and other sailing women?),
and notes that the physical mobility enabled by the ocean was fundamental to their intellectual
motility. Yet while many of these masculine sailor-intellectuals resurface in Gilroy's later discussions, the history of their sea
voyages does not. Both ships and the Atlantic itself—as concrete maritime space rather than conceptual principle for remapping
blackness—drop out of his text immediately after this paragraph. Neither the Middle Passage nor the Atlantic appear in the index,
remaining phantom metaphors rather than concrete historical presences. Gilroy's ghost ships and dark waters traverse five
memorable pages of his introduction, then slip into nowhereness.
Err affirmative - the meaning of “oceans” is socially constructed, and their vision of
the resolution serves only to uphold empire and the inheritance of the white man
Mohanram ‟03 Radhika, Professor of English at Cardiff University, available from Project MUSE, Journal of Colonialism and
Colonial History, 4.3, no page numbers provided online,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v004/4.3mohanram.html, ―White Water: Race and
Oceans Down Under‖ | ADM
If the meanings of the oceans and water are constructions, if their mythical meanings and
gendered meanings reflect social constructions, how else can they be read? How else are they perceived? In
this next section I want to read the density of the meaning of water, its textures, in the nineteenth century. I want to concentrate on
this era because the discourse of empire and the politics of racial hierarchies seep into the
meaning and distribution of water. I want to begin by suggesting that there are two different
strands to the meaning of water in the nineteenth century: water as part of hygiene and
the water of oceans, its currents, its dominance and its yielding of wealth. Both are
interlinked as they function to produce the background of empire and black
embodiment. Each facilitated the other; the former justified, to some extent, the latter because the lack of
"hygiene" was incorporated as the bourgeois white man's burden. The wealth of the oceans also becomes the
rightful inheritance of the white man.
Perm vs. Critiques
Permutation solves – the black Atlantic challenges pervasive dichotomies that
structure the criticism. Embracing all aspects of cultural hybridity is consistent with
the alternative and solves the critique – that’s Goyal
There is no singular truth of the black experience – our theory of the black Atlantic
rejects ontological essentialism and incorporates unique divisions based on class,
sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and economics
Murray ‟05 Rolland D., Associate Professor of English at Brown University, author of Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black
Power, and Masculine Ideology (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). His current project considers the impact of postidentity politics on
contemporary African American culture. His essays have been published in such journals as the Yale Journal of Criticism,
Contemporary Literature, and Callaloo. He has been awarded fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as well as the
Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, available from Project MUSE,
Contemporary Literature, 46.1, pg. 72-73, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/contemporary_literature/v046/46.1murray.html, ―Diaspora
by Bus: Reginald McKnight, Postmodernism, and Transatlantic Subjectivity‖ | ADM
McKnight's revision of détour and his rejection of the therapeutic remembrance of slavery are but extensions of his more substantial
divergence from an influential current within contemporary diaspora theory. Analyses by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Brent
Edwards labor to rehabilitate the concept of diaspora by repudiating its historical
implication in narrow nationalism, essentialism, and political inefficacy. This
rehabilitative inclination no doubt guides Hall's efforts to distance his concept of contemporary
diasporic identity from an ideology that privileges the singular "truth, the essence of
'Caribbeanness,' of the black experience" (393). As an alternative, Hall valorizes a constructivist
version of black Atlantic selfhood, one that thrives by "the recognition of a necessary
heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives through, and not despite
difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew,
through transformation and difference" (402). His retooling of diaspora turns both on validating the
constitutive social divisions within a black collective and a keen self-consciousness
about the provisional ways in which such identities are reproduced. Gilroy certainly draws inspiration
from Hall on one level, but his project also explicitly takes issue with Hall's brand of pluralist constructivism. In The Black
Atlantic, Gilroy imagines his own work as a third term in the opposition between an
"ontologically grounded essentialism" and "a pluralistic position which affirms blackness
as an open signifier and seeks to celebrate complex representations of a black particularity that is internally
divided" by "class, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, economics, and political
consciousness" (32). Against this binary opposition he posits an Atlantic world culture
that in one instantiation is bound by transnational forms of black expressive culture. These insurgent
cultural practices articulate a transformative "utopia" in which "[i]ts basic desire is to conjure up and enact the new modes of
friendship, happiness and solidarity that are consequent on the overcoming of the racial oppression on which modernity and its
antinomy of rational western progress as excessive barbarity relied" (38). The ineffable utopian expressions of black dance and song
thus become the foundation upon which [End Page 72] he imagines a diasporic culture more viable than that of the pluralists and
essentialists.13 This disposition toward rehabilitation appears no less vigorously in Edwards's deeply historicist
project, The Practice of Diaspora. The book revisits the flowering of black internationalism in the modernist
era to recover the rich contacts between Francophone and U.S. writers. Fascinatingly, the study also brackets the
persistent ideological and political inadequacies of this political imaginary by attending more
rigorously to the historical construction of those relays. For instance, one of the project's key terms, "décalage," refers to the
necessary unevenness in the translation of ideas across linguistic, political, cultural, and geographical divides. In one sense,
décalage describes the rhetorical prostheses put into place to "fill some gap or rectify some imbalance" in these transnational
cultural exchanges (14). The prosthetic function indexes "precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged, the refused biases
that refuse to pass over when one crosses the water. It is the changing core of difference; it is the work of
'differences within unity'" (14). The concept—nuanced and provocative as it is—also asks us to substitute
interpretation of how diasporic identities are transmitted and represented for an analytical assessment of the political ends of
diaspora. Put another way, a constructivist account of highly politicized identities takes precedence over a more instrumental
assessment of how political claims fulfill their agendas. As Edwards argues, "Instead of reading for the efficacy of the prosthesis,
this orientation would look for the effects of such an operation" (14). By shifting the grounds for assessment this way, the argument
participates in the rehabilitative tendencies of its predecessors.

Capitalism Critique
Perm
Note – Genius in Bondage refers to Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (edited by Vincent Carretta and Philip
Gould)
Elmer „5 Jonathan, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, he has published on Jefferson, Poe, Wright, and Lacan,
and is completing a book titled On Lingering and Being Last: Race, Sovereignty, and Archive, available from Project MUSE, American
Literary History, 17.1, pg 163-65, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v017/17.1elmer.html#authbio, ―The
Black Atlantic Archive‖ | ADM
Genius in Bondage is a superb collection of essays gathering work by some of the major
literary scholars working in the field: in addition to the contributions from the editors, Carretta and Gould, there
are essays by Markman Ellis, Roxann Wheeler, Felicity A. Nussbaum, and William L. Andrews, among others. In some ways, this
volume feels like a companion to Carretta's excellent anthology from 1996, also published by Kentucky, Unchained Voices: An
Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century. Of the 16 authors collected in that anthology, nine
receive extended treatment in the essays of Genius in Bondage. The editors emphasize that their collection "aims to
situate early black writing in its own historical terms" (11), by which they mean it resists the impulse to
describe these writers as mere anticipations of monumental figures of the nineteenth century such as Frederick Douglass. Despite
his skepticism toward the canonizing impulse, Gilroy had nonetheless projected something like a tradition, focusing at length on the
complex careers and thought of those safely in the canon, such as Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Richard Wright. In Genius
in Bondage, Gilroy's call to complicate the historicism of canon building is answered, as it
were, by a commitment to more, not less, historical contextualization. The results are often fascinating.
Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, for example, reprint and analyze a number of letters between African slave traders in Old
Calabar and their counterparts in Liverpool and Bristol. They focus on the "spread of literacy in English," as well as the
"development of the indigenous nsibidi script," as strictly correlative to economic exchange, an "extension of this [End Page 163]
system of trade and trust" (97). Robert S. Levine concludes the volume with an interesting biographical sketch of Nathaniel Paul, a
free African-American preacher and abolitionist from Albany active in the 1830s, whom Levine argues "had a major impact
on...black Atlantic abolitionism" (257). Other essays are more interpretive in emphasis but still contribute much to our historical
understanding of how various discursive constraints impinged on the experience and
expressions of these writers. Nussbaum's essay subtly analyzes how Sancho and Equiano negotiate
gender codes within their racialized world: "How was a black man in England to shape a
masculinity when male sociability rested on imperialism, commerce, and trade, the very
trade to which he was subject and which made of him a commodity?" (57). Gillian Whitlock's analysis of The History of Mary Prince
(1831) also zeroes in on questions of gender presentation. Taken cumulatively, however, it is the intersection of the
vocabularies of race, sentiment, and commerce that receives the most detailed attention in
the volume. On this topic, Roxann Wheeler's essay stands out. In a richly documented assessment of the function of race and
skin color in Cugoano, Wheeler makes the summary claim—developed in compelling detail in her book, The
Complexion of Race (2000)—that racial discourse was added on, as it were, to the already established
discourse linking economy and affect: "The distinction between civil and savage societies
that tended to hierarchize populations based on their mode of production was, arguably,
the most significant rubric for understanding eighteenth-century racial arguments—and their
convolutions—about Africans" (24). Gould makes a related argument in his monograph, Barbaric Traffic, for here again a
moral discourse about trade is shown to be the constraining context in which disputes
about slavery and race were conducted: "The subject of racial difference was framed by the more flexible
categories of savagery, civilization, commerce and manners" (45). In other words, "late eighteenth-century literature against
the slave trade [was] in part...an expression of the changing commercial culture in the
Atlantic world" (2). Emphasizing the "mutually constitutive relation of sentiment and
capitalism" (3), Gould suggests in effect that antislavery rhetoric was a species of self-
correction within commercial ideology: "branding the African slave trade as 'barbaric' commerce made other
forms of commerce seem civilized and legitimate" (2). Wheeler and Gould thus push the significance of
the black Atlantic toward a more emphatically economic meaning: taking the "the
Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis" here means reflecting on the discursive
and ideological transformations accompanying the development of, and resistance to,
the slave trade and the plantation system, transformations affecting white and [End Page 164] black alike. Gilroy
observed that often "the history of slavery is assigned to blacks" rather than being seen as "part
of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West as a whole" (49). Many of the essays in Gould and
Carretta, as well as Gould's monograph, avoid such a segregation of intellectual labor, and in so doing extend the research program
beyond the question of specifically black expression. And in focusing on the way in which slavery and
antislavery could only be understood within a discursive context that moralized
economic questions, that understood commerce and sentiment as "mutually constitutive," such studies also
remind us how powerfully such discourse still enables, or constrains, us. In maintaining that the
"rise of liberal society was not necessarily inimical to the blacks' language of identity politics"
(123), that on the contrary it "enrich[ed] the rhetorical possibility for creative agency of black
subjects" (124), Gould is asking us to see Equiano or Smith, for example, as not merely deluded or co-
opted when they ascribe emancipatory possibilities to trade and commerce. Easier said than done,
however. Gould passingly refers to the "fantasy of 'guiltless commerce'" (40) at one point, a phrase which would seem to indicate
that for him "commerce" cannot, or should not, be separated from a moral vocabulary of guilt
and innocence. One effect of reading these careful reconstructions of the discursive environments
linking racial identity, commerce, and feeling in the late eighteenth century is that it brings out
strong continuities with our own age, in which it seems that capitalism remains—for proponents and critics
alike—ineluctably a matter of sentiment.
Critique of Cosmopolitanism
Modernity – Aff solves
Divorcing modernity from black intellectualism is impossible – the aff reconceives
modernity founded upon the catastrophic rupture of the middle passage and
appreciation for African tradition
Nielsen 94 Aldon Lynn, The George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at Pennsylvania State University,
held positions at San Jose State University , the University of California in Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University, available
from Project MUSE, Modernism/Modernity, 1.3, pg. 276-77, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-
modernity/v001/1.3br_gilroy.html, ―Book Review: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness‖ | ADM
Major portions of this volume are given to interpretive studies of the trans-Atlantic careers of Martin Delany, W. E. B. DuBois, and
Richard Wright. Gilroy's work here is important not only for its bringing back to critical
attention major efforts by these authors that have been overlooked or undervalued (DuBois's
German and African residencies and Wright's later books in particular); it also grounds his larger argument about
the need to reconceive modernity. Martin Delany is a key figure here. For many years Delany was known to
literature scholars only for his remarkable novel Blake: or, The Huts of America, while he was known to historians primarily for his
efforts as an African colonizationist and as a soldier. But Delany, who had been admitted to Harvard for medical training only on
the condition that he leave the country afterwards and practice in Liberia, and who was asked to leave Harvard anyway by no less a
personage than Dean Oliver Wendell Holmes, is also the author of such texts as The Origin of Races and Color (1879) and The
Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), texts that have only recently been
reprinted in readily available editions. Delany's example has much to do with Gilroy's arguments about modernity. In Gilroy's
estimation, "The version of black solidarity Blake advances is explicitly antiethnic and
opposes narrow African-American exceptionalism in the name of a truly pan-African,
diaspora sensibility. This makes blackness a matter of politics rather than a common
cultural condition" (27). This also makes Delany's form of pan-Africanism an implicit critique
of standard models of historical modernity. Gilroy argues that "many of the advances of [End
Page 276] modernity are in fact insubstantial or pseudo-advances contingent on the power of
the racially dominant grouping and that, as a result, the critique of modernity cannot be
satisfactorily completed from within its own philosophical and political norms, that is,
immanently" (56). The critique offered by texts such as Delany's, though, is clearly a product of the colonial contact, a
product of Western thought and African intellectual tradition, as is, Gilroy points out, even
the most ethnocentric of today's Afrocentrism. Gilroy agrees with the case made by C. L. R. James, in
Black Jacobins, and by W. E. B. DuBois, in Black Reconstruction, that Africans brought by commerce and
cruelty to the slave systems of the Western hemisphere became the first of the modern
peoples. What he subsequently finds in his readings of Black Atlantic thinkers, including contemporary novelists like Toni
Morrison and popular black musicians on both sides of the Atlantic, is that¶ their conceptions of modernity
were periodised differently. They were founded on the catastrophic rupture of the
middle passage rather than the dream of revolutionary transformation. They were punctuated
by the processes of acculturation and terror that followed that catastrophe and by the countercultural aspirations towards freedom,
citizenship, and autonomy that developed after it among slaves and their descendants. (197)¶ Gilroy's own examples, C. L. R. James,
Martin Delany, and W. E. B. DuBois, of course demonstrate that Black Atlantic thought also moved to the
dream of revolutionary transformation; but in Gilroy's account theirs is a modernity
marked by different sets of ideas about the relationships of past to present, marked
by a temporal sense in which tradition is no longer the binary opposite of the
modern. "Apart from anything else," Gilroy asserts, "the globalisation of vernacular forms means that
our understanding of antiphony will have to change" (110). While some may argue with Gilroy's views of
textuality, or may find his heuristic becoming reified, those too are antiphonal responses to a most provocative call.
Modernity was structured upon a cultural hierarchy positioning Europeans as
privileged – the black Atlantic represents a “counterculture of modernity” that
revises and restructures the traditional modernity
Muthyala ‟01 John, visiting assistant professor of English at Luther College, Decorah, Iowa. He is currently at work on a
book-length manuscript on the literatures of the Americas, available from Project MUSE, Cultural Critique, 47, pg. 106-109,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v047/47.1muthyala.html, ―Reworlding America: The Globalization of American
Studies‖ | ADM
Richard's central argument is that the entire project of modernity, in the general sense of European expansion in the Americas, Africa, and Asia,
was designed to position Europeans as privileged classes and subjects marching
toward an ever unfolding, grand, and universal history. As the English, French, Spanish, and other European
settlers established themselves as colonial powers in the Americas, native societies and cultures faced
the prospect of either complete annihilation or a form of condescending assimilation coupled with native
cultural denigration. Speaking specifically of Spanish America, Richard writes, "In this Manichean scheme of things, modernity is found guilty of having destroyed the
characteristics of a true Latin American identity through a conglomeration of influences which are invariably regarded as threats, falsifications, or travesties of the region's
original and authentic nucleus of culture" (466). In other words, modernization in the Americas always meant Europeanization. It is significant that Richard pushes the
historical time frame of modernity back into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the time of European settlement in the Americas. But this differs from [End Page 106]
Habermas' emphasis on the eighteenth century as marking the evolution of the Enlightenment project. By pushing Habermas' historical time frame backward, Richard
productively links the idea of modernity as suggesting an abrupt break from the past, with the rhetoric of progress and civilization, and not so much with the self-sufficiency of
reason that is characteristic of the Enlightenment. Richard actually seems to echo the arguments made by the Mexican philosopher Edmundo O'Gorman in The Invention of
America (1961) whose thesis is that modernity in the Americas began not when it was discovered but when it began to be invented. I will first comment on O'Gorman's
arguments and then relate them to Richard's configuration of modernity. O'Gorman rejects the substantialistic concept of America as a thing-in-itself waiting to be discovered
and whose discovery would automatically unravel the meaning of America. Rather than being a ready-made thing already there, existing in time and space, discourse and
belief, O'Gorman argues that America was "produced" in the intersection of Old World cosmographic theories, European political intrigues, religious injunctions and
worldviews, and personal idiosyncrasies and dispositions, all of which gave rise to the meaning of America over a period of time. Coterminous with this production of
America, an incipient humanism that stressed the limitless potential of man to shape his own cosmic destiny began to gain credence. 6 It is in this context that, according to
O'Gorman, America "developed from a complex, living process of exploration and interpretation" (124), and its "history will no longer be that which has happened to America,
but that which it has been, is, and is in the act of being" (46). Common to O'Gorman and Richard is the analeptic extension of modernity and the idea of a break or rupture from
the past, but while Richard privileges the perspective of the Native Indians and the African slaves, O'Gorman recasts modernity as the undermining of medieval beliefs
beginning with the finding, not the discovery, of a landmass west of Europe. To O'Gorman, it is the very production of America as a narrative strategy that marks the process of
modernization or, rather, the entry point of modernity in the Americas. If we begin with Richard's and O'Gorman's premise, modernity begins with the era of New World
conquest and settlement, the consolidation of colonial power, and later, in the eighteenth century, at least as far as Europe is concerned, coalesces with the project of the
Enlightenment, [End Page 107] the founding of nations, the establishing of juridical institutions, the development of the army, and the building of roads, bridges, railroads,
trains, telephones, hospitals, etc. It is in this context that we can productively extend Gilroy's notion of the black Atlantic and Glissant's idea of overlapping modernities, and it
is to these issues that I now turn. Arguing that studying writers likes Du Bois, Martin Delaney, Phyllis Wheatley, Claude McKay, and Richard
Wright, among others, within the nationalist framework of the United States would be parochial,
since such a nationalist focus would neglect to address the implications of travel and
displacement that all the writers experienced, Gilroy proposes the black Atlantic "as a single,
complex, unit of analysis . . . to produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective" to
study the "deterritorialized, multiplex and anti-national basis for the affinity of the identity of passions between divers black populations"
(15). It is within the nexus of the black Atlantic, argues Gilroy, that we see the emergence of a
"counter culture of modernity." He uses the image of the ship as a metaphor to
conceptualize the intercontinental engagement of cultures and economies. The ship as
perpetually moving, as emblematic of the "shifting spaces" and "half-remembered micro-politics of the
slave trade and its relationship to both industrialization and modernization" (16-17), and as shaping the Atlantic as a "system of cultural exchanges" (14)
dramatizes the dispersal of migrant cultures, a dispersal that redraws the margins of
the nation by contesting the absolutism of ethnic identity and the provincialism of
nationalism. It would be useful to link Gilroy's idea of the articulation of a counterculture of
modernity with Edouard Glissant's notion of the "irruption of modernity" in the Americas. Glissant distinguishes between a
"maturing" European modernity and a "living" American modernity, and argues that while modernity in Europe was a gradual
and slow process, in the Americas we have the "irruption of modernity," since the process of conquest
and settlement resulted in abrupt and profound changes in the New World. He argues that literary tradition and, by extension, history itself in the Americas did not mature and
evolve slowly over time as it did in Europe. This nonmaturing process Glissant calls "lived modernity," to connote the sense of immediacy and unpredictability that necessarily
accompanies the [End Page 108] writing of history and the quest for identity in the collision of societies and cultures in the Americas. It is sudden, brutal, imposed, and connotes
a "violent departure from tradition, from literary continuity" (146). Thus, to Glissant, literature in the Americas "is the product of a
system of modernity that is sudden and not sustained or 'evolved' " (149). But what is crucial in Glissant's
formulation of lived modernity is his emphasis that lived modernity "overlaps with the preoccupations of matured 'modernity' in other zones of culture and thought" (150). It
is here that we can link Gilroy's notions of "syncopated temporality" and the
articulation of black identity as a "counter-culture of modernity" with Glissant's configuration of the poetics
of the Americas as lived modernity. The revision of history and the recovery of culture in the Americas are thus
possible only from within the sites of chiasmus of these modernities.
Permutation
Perm – the aff doesn’t reject afrocentrism – rather, we incorporate afrocentrism
within a broader frame of racial cosmopolitanism to better forward the cause of
black liberation
Reid-Pharr ‟01 Robert F., Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, he is the author of Conjugal Union: The
Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Black Gay Man (New York University Press,
forthcoming), Available from Project MUSE, American Literary History, 13.1, pg. 169-171,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v013/13.1reid-pharr.html, ―Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto
Intellectual‖ | ADM
Reading Ross Posnock's Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual in relation to Wilson Jeremiah
Moses's Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History requires coming to terms with both writers' insistence that
categories generally understood as mutually exclusive--black and intellectual, Afrocentrism
and cosmopolitanism--are so intimately intertwined as to make them indistinguishable.
Posnock's refreshing critique of the idea that the black intellectual is a new and peculiar
phenomenon gains much of its force from his careful unpacking of American
intellectual genealogies. He reminds us that the concept of the intellectual was transplanted from Europe into America
largely via the efforts of twentieth-century black writers, particularly W. E. B. Du Bois, to produce the self-consciously politicized
intellectualism on display during the Dreyfus Affair. Like Posnock, Moses insists that we look to a much
longer process, one that has its roots deep in the cultural and social history of both
Europe and America, to understand the intellectual tendencies and traditions loosely grouped
under the rubric of Afrocentrism. Specifically, he reiterates a previously made, but never fully appreciated, observation
that not only have many of the central figures of Afrocentrism been self-identified as European or Euro-American (Franz Boas,
Melville Herskovits, Bronislaw Malinowski) but that a significant portion might be properly understood to have been apologists for
both racial segregation and slavery (Johann Gottfried Herder, Arthur De Gobineau, Robert Park). [End Page 169] In making these
claims, Posnock and Moses regularly return to the question of the mulatto. Posnock expends
considerable energies trying to make sense of the articulation of mulatto status by "black" intellectuals such as Du Bois, Jean
Toomer, and more recently Samuel Delany and Adrian Kennedy, while Moses paints a picture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
black intellectualism that presents the broadly grinning face of white "benefactors" at almost every turn. The mulatto becomes, then,
an actual impediment in the production of a black intellectual history. Frederick Douglass, Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Walter
White, Alain Locke, Booker T. Washington, and a host of other black writers, educators, and political activists could have been--and
often were--identified as mulatto at least until 1920, when the category was dropped from the American census. The notion
of black intellectualism, as articulated by Posnock and Moses, begs the question of whether there can
be a black intellectualism, including Afrocentrism, that is not already a mulatto
intellectualism. Both men's work radically reconfigures black American intellectual genealogies, such that the 1920s become
not so much a moment in which black intellectuals come to recognize the essential Africanness of their culture, but instead one in
which black intellectuals in concert with white social scientists begin the very difficult cultural and social work of erasing the
distinction between black and mulatto and rigidifying the distinction between the purely black and the wholly white. This idea,
which is suggested forcefully in the work of both scholars, is compelling because it disallows the still widely held notion that black
intellectual movements such as the Harlem Renaissance represent a return to a black and African originality that somehow had
been lost by earlier generations of black Americans. Specifically, this radical idea insists that the expression of black identity, even
putatively Afrocentric expression, was always a cosmopolitan (that is to say, interracial, transnational) affair. Indeed, one of the
more startling implications of Posnock's and Moses's work is that cosmopolitanism, even as it is prescribed
as an anecdote to feverishly parochial concepts of self, may have its roots deep in the production of the
same provincialisms that it is expected to overcome. Can there be a cosmopolitanism in
the absence of Afrocentrism? Can there be a cosmopolitan who is not mulatto? Is the sense of vertigo invoked by the
appellation cosmopolitan Afrocentric mulatto intellectual a factor of our recognition of the improbability of the notion, or our shock
at its overdetermination? [End Page 170] I began with this line of thinking almost from the first moment of reading Posnock's Color
and Culture, when I was particularly taken with his clever rescripting of twentieth-century intellectual history in which he suggests
Du Bois as a primary conduit between the Dreyfussards of turn-of-the-century France and modern American writers. On the one
hand, he insists on the importance of a black, or rather a mulatto (the waffling on this point continues even
today), in the reproduction of the notion of the intellectual as politically engaged cosmopolitan. On
the other, he reminds us that there was never a pure moment of either American or European
intellectualism in which pernicious distinctions of race and ethnicity did not exist. The
Dreyfus Affair was fueled by the deeply rooted anti-Semitism of fin de siècle France and the cosmopolitan, universalist response of
French intellectuals, particularly Emile Zola. Posnock rightly celebrates their efforts to give voice to "humankind's sense of justice
and humanity against the anti-Semitism of French nationalists." He then reminds us that the word intellectual comes into modern
political and cultural discourse as a slur against the Dreyfussards, who were branded as both "[i]ntellectuels" and "déracinés" (2).

Eurocentrism DA
Aff solves the impact – endorsing the black Atlantic reclaims the academy from the
Eurocentric elite to affirm the independence of Black internationalism – best solves
emancipation – that’s West and Martin

The alt fails to resolve Eurocentrism because it relies on essential meanings of
Africanity – the aff’s focus on the Middle Passage presents a better epistemological
approach for combating Eurocentric domination of the academy
Davies 99 Carol Boyce, Professor of English, Africana Studies, and Comparative Literature and Director of the African-New
World Studies Program at Florida International University in North Miami, available from Project MUSE, Research in African
Literatures, 30.2, pg. 99, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v030/30.2davies.html, ―Beyond
Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presences‖ | ADM
Let us therefore look at the assumptions of dominance in knowledge production that are at the center of Eurocentricity and its
descendant US centricity. It is perhaps easiest to mount a critique of Eurocentrism in the academy
as a great deal of literature has been amassed in this effort. This critique has been well advanced by a variety of
black scholars throughout black intellectual history in the wake of Middle Passage
enslavement and its aftermaths. More importantly, the evidence of Eurocentrism is still all
around us and masquerades as universalism or "normalcy." One recent contribution in the attempt to challenge
Eurocentrism is Marimba Ani's Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (1997), which
pursues Eurocentricity in a detailed and, in her own words, "African-centered" manner. Still, Ani's
approach, in order to work, has to claim a certain set of essential (often geneticist) meanings of
Africanity and often gives over to Eurocentricity much that it should not. So rather than
invent these critiques of Eurocentricity, I want to briefly summarize some of them here with the aim of arriving at some
understanding of its larger logic of unicentricity.¶ The entire project of what began to be known as "Black Studies"
in the late '60s and early '70s was directed at challenging the Euro/US-centric bases of education
under which the contemporary academy rested. Indeed, while "Black Studies" as a field assumed a certain cohesion in the
wake of entry into the institutions of black students (integration), prior generations of scholars had consistently whittled
away at the assumptions of Eurocentricity. This is not to suggest that Latin American,
Asian, and Arabic thinkers have not been engaged in this project of challenging
Eurocentrism and its construction of the other. Rather, the concern here is to identify some of the scholars in the "Black
Studies" tradition. Among them, the generation that included W. E. B. DuBois engaged in an unrelenting attack on the Eurocentric
bases of knowledge and consistently advanced African peoples as worthy subjects of study. Scholars like Carter Woodson and a
range of others subsequently pursued similar tasks at the level of recognizing this "mis-education." Subsequently, historians like
John Hope Franklin, in "The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar" (1963) identified how racism and Eurocentrism interfered
with the ability of black scholarship to flourish. Thus, the entire enterprise that has come to be known as
African-American, African, or Africana Studies can be defined as the interrogation of
knowledge production in ways that challenged the epistemological violence that
Eurocentrism visited on non-Western and Western peoples. The conclusion would be that the entire
edifice of Western civilization operates on falsehood and perpetuates ignorance and
misinformation as it is assumed/continues to assume this Eurocentric error. [End Page 99]

Afrocentrism Alt
Afrocentrism fails –
a. Presents a unidirectional narrative back to Africa – that’s an epistemologically
flawed vision of Black liberation
b. Privileges a shared history over distinct, individual memories – fails to
appreciate the dislocation forced by Atlantic slavery and attempts to force a
collective movement that results in violence
c. National particularity and ethnicity constrains progress and constructs the
nation as analogous to the master
Elmer „5 Jonathan, Associate Professor of English at Indiana University, he has published on Jefferson, Poe, Wright, and Lacan,
and is completing a book titled On Lingering and Being Last: Race, Sovereignty, and Archive, available from Project MUSE, American
Literary History, 17.1, pg 160-61, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v017/17.1elmer.html#authbio, ―The
Black Atlantic Archive‖ | ADM
What, exactly, is the "black Atlantic"? It has been more than a decade since Paul Gilroy published his influential monograph, The
Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Since three of the four books under review have the phrase "black
Atlantic" in their titles (the fourth, Philip Gould's Barbaric Traffic, refers more generally to the "18th-century Atlantic world,"
presumably because many of the writers he considers were not black), we can begin by asking what these authors find most
compelling about Gilroy's book. For Vincent Carretta and Gould, The Black Atlantic offers an "influential"
path beyond nation and race as master terms, "[i]magining instead a diasporic model of racial
identity" (3). In the fourth chapter of Barbaric Traffic, Gould contends that the autobiographies of John Marrant and Venture
Smith argue against Gilroy's claim that liberalism and the Enlightenment are little more than
engines of "terror" for black people in the eighteenth century (123). But Gould's very topic—antislavery
rhetoric in England and America— clearly follows Gilroy's lead in replacing the nation-state with a
"transatlantic context" (7). Gilroy is most pervasively present as a model in Alan Rice's Radical Narratives of the Black
Atlantic. For Rice, Gilroy's book was "epochal," a "paradigm shift beyond the narrow nationalisms
of much African diasporan history" (23). Rice makes much of Gilroy's clever pun that the black Atlantic's
"counterculture of modernity" was more a matter of "routes" than "roots." Because their collection of primary texts focuses on black
writers who moved, either physically or imaginatively, between the US, Nova Scotia, England, and Sierra Leone, Joanna Brooks and
John Saillant unsurprisingly also seize on this pun in "Face Zion Forward" (5). Clearly, Gilroy's book remains a
powerful model of thinking beyond the self-serving narratives of the nation-state, a shift of
perspective that our current global self-consciousness finds right and proper. But this surely cannot be the whole reason for Gilroy's
influence. Such a transnational vision was not in itself a new approach to black history and culture in 1993, after all. Scholars
studying the cultural transformations of the African diaspora (Brooks and Saillant note particularly Robert Farris Thompson and
Cedric Robinson [End Page 160] [233n1]), as well as historians of modern slavery (David Brion Davis, to take only one important
example), necessarily took a more geographical than national approach to their topics. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s important books
anticipate Gilroy in trying to rethink the legacies of Enlightenment and modernity from
the perspective of black experience, and his famous chapter in The Signifyin(g) Monkey (1988) on the trope of the
"talking book" took early notice of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Olaudah Equiano, now canonical figures of what Carretta
and Gould call the "early black Atlantic." (Gates, in turn, was building from the work of Paul Edwards, whose 1960s editions of
Ignatius Sancho, Equiano, and Ottobah Cugoano, with their "magisterial introductions" [Carretta and Gould 2], brought these
crucial eighteenth-century authors back into visibility). But Gates remained too bound to a canonizing
impulse both ethnic and national, according to Gilroy; he was still too committed to something called an
African-American tradition. The Black Atlantic, by contrast, focused on those aspects of
African diasporic experience and expression that "transcend both the structures of the nation state
and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity" (19), "structures" and
"constraints" that have hampered and vitiated, or so Gilroy argued, scholarly traditions as different as British
cultural studies, Afrocentrism, and African-American literary history. Gilroy
proposed instead a geopolitical approach that took "the Atlantic as one single, complex
unit of analysis" (15), an approach that might be said both to have widened the focus, substituting
capitalism and empire, for example, for nation and ethnicity as master terms, and narrowed it to
the manifold ways in which selves—racial, gendered, ethnic, national, and diasporic—are pieced
together in communicative acts. It may be that Gilroy proved unusually influential not through sharpening analytic
concepts, but from loosening them and encouraging their recombination in new configurations.